Cirque de Triomphe
by TrisakAminawn
Summary: A cruel Owl sharpens his Talons, and holds Gotham by the throat, but the rule of fear cannot be complete so long as there are still those who laugh at the dark. (And this, o my best-beloved, is why we have clowns.)
1. The Owl and the Dead Boy

'The Owl and the Dead Boy'

* * *

In a darkened, barren cell, on the highest security level of the highest security prison in the world, this is what the security cameras would have seen, if they had still been working:

A certain dark-haired man narrowed eyes like ice at the corridor beyond his bars. He was manacled, even here, and wearing only the shapeless grey costume issued to prisoners, but there was no defeat in the set of his shoulders or the cold lines of his readily-recognizable face. Not long ago, he had been the wealthiest man in the world, and had more power than almost any king.

"Show yourself," he commanded.

Silence, for a moment, as though he had been talking to himself. Then out of a thin shadow that didn't seem it could have hidden anyone, there folded a lean figure in a hooded coat of charcoal-grey, faceless in the gloom. With its right hand it leveled a viciously sharp bolt in a small crossbow at the prisoner's heart, and with the other reached up to pull back its own hood.

It was another man, much younger, who might easily have been the first's natural son, though his features were finer and his eyes a far darker blue. His face was nearly as cold as the prisoner's, and even more expressionless.

The man behind bars wasted only a fraction of a second on recognition, and no time at all on surprise. "Talon."

The younger man narrowed his eyes very slightly. "My _name_ is _Richard_."

"Is that what cowards call themselves?"

A tightness about still lips. "I only wish I'd run from you sooner."

"You ran because you _failed_."

"I'm glad I failed."

The older man snorted, very softly. "_Are_ you? Wilson will hunt you down sooner or later, so long as he's alive, and he's not the type to show mercy to the penitent."

"I took the life of one of his children and the voice from the other. If he does to me what you did to Joe Chill, I won't be surprised."

Scorn covered the prisoner's face. "Are you going to _let_ him?"

A pause. "No."

"Then are you really sorry?"

"Not sorry enough to die," the once-Talon shrugged. "But sorry enough not to kill him. I'm choosy with my murder, these days."

"You are a failure."

"I am what I am." Richard did not seem to feel the need to say anything more, but merely held his position and watched the man in the cell where he stood, some little way beyond the bars that would electrocute at a touch.

"You aren't here to help your old master escape," the prisoner stated, at length. Glanced from the young man's blank eyes to the sharp, sharp bolt trained on his heart. No sign of anything but calm. "Are you going to kill me?"

The renegade Talon stood in silence for a moment, eyes narrowed again. "I want to," he said finally. "You have no idea how much I want to. But there are a lot of other people who've made claims on your head. It seems greedy to cut ahead of the line like this, when I didn't even help bring you down. You can only die once, after all."

He drifted a little closer to the bars on utterly silent feet, the razor bolt never wavering. "You aren't frightening, Bruce. They've taken your weapons, and your secrets, and your wealth, and your Court, and all your servants who hadn't already turned on you. You aren't king anymore, and you aren't the Owl either. You're only a man."

"And you're not even that," Bruce murmured, poisonous, unruffled.

"Maybe not," Richard allowed. And then, for the first time, the corners of his lips bent up in the least of smiles. "But I'm learning."

"I made you," the prisoner once known as Owlman cut out the words like individual sharp-edged shards of steel. "Everything you are comes from me."

His former student shook his head a very little, not disagreeing but dismissing. "I know you think this is just a setback," he said levelly. "That you'll get out of here and start building up a new power base, and take back your city. But if you ever get out of here, if one of the others doesn't get to you first—_then_ I'll kill you. Yes, you made me. So you know what I can do. If I come for your head, you won't even know I'm there until you're dead."

_'Speak not a whispered word of them, or here comes Talon for your head__—!'_

The Talon darted toward the cell sharply, suddenly, something small cupped in his left hand, and the Owl jumped back, guard up, his hands painfully empty of anything that might serve as weapon or shield, and chained too close together to be much use. But the rogue assassin's hand only slapped against the wall and withdrew, without ever quite approaching the bars. The prisoner glared suspiciously from the back of his cell. His visitor's eyebrows twitched, infinitesimally.

And the tiny device now glued to reinforced concrete squawked out tinnily: "_I am the terror that flaps in the night!_" A bar of triumphal cartoon music blared, and then silence fell again.

The Owl stared, flat disbelief, and then his face twisted with fury. Talon—Richard—smiled again, a little wider. "I figured there was a reason you always hated the Jokester so much," he said.

"_I am the terror that flaps in the night!_"

"So I copied his style."

"Talon…" Owlman gritted out.

"Richard," corrected his old protégée, his old servant, the first of his tame assassins and the first to run from him. Ten years gone. "Grayson. There is no Talon anymore. Just a lone old bird in a cage."

The tiny speaker on the wall broke into low, musical hooting; a recognizable pattern. A message, in the Court of Owls' old coded communication, more rarely used in the modern age but still preserved, still taught to its members and its weapons. _Failure. Prisoner. Death._

"_I am the terror that flaps in the night!_" it declaimed happily a moment later. _Dun-dun-dun-dah! **Bing!**_

"It's on a randomizer," said Richard. "Good luck sleeping."

He melted back into the shadows. "I won't see you again, unless you get free. And you won't see me at all."

"_I am the terror that flaps in the night!_" (_Dun-dun-dun-dah! Bing!)_

Owlman's teeth grated so loudly it was easily audible across the room, and for the first time since he was six years old, as he picked his way out of the deepest dungeon in the world, very quietly, Richard Grayson laughed.

* * *

**A/N: **_The 'terror that flaps in the night' is, of course, Darkwing Duck. (A Batman parody whose nemesis was his evil self from an alternate universe, hah.:]) __Cover art is cut from the issue of _Countdown to Final Crisis _where the heroic Jokester jumps in and saves Jason Todd and the Challengers of the Beyond from the entire Injustice Syndicate. _

_This is not that Earth-3, nor is it the one featured in _Forever Evil_, or any of the older versions, but it plunders all of them and the rest of comics canon for things to mirror, with the goal of developing the premise into an independent superhero setting, rather than just a place to get crossover villains from. The second chapter is a brief coda to this one, and then the story gets rolling. Anachronically, as we have begun near the end.  
_


	2. This Night Whispers My Name

Terror II: 'This Night Whispers My Name'

* * *

The Owl remained standing in the dimness when his traitorous Talon had gone.

The noisy device was unnecessarily near the cell. Certainly that meant it was slightly louder, but—Talon had specially advanced to place his noisemaker _precisely_ out of reach. Or rather, precisely _in_ the reach of Owlman, if he was willing to endure a little pain.

Unhesitating, unwilling to waste a second of whatever window was left in whatever Talon had done to the cameras, Bruce Wayne dislocated his own thumb, pulled his left hand from its cuff, crossed to the bars, and jammed his arm into the furthest-right gap.

The bars were not really far enough apart to admit his elbow, but he forced it through anyway, crushed overdefined biceps through the narrow space, whole body jerking with electric current, teeth clenched against any sound of pain or effort. Bent his wrist, closed his fingers around the tiny machine. _Failure, _it hooted. _Prisoner._

Somehow he managed not to crush it in his hand. Snaked his abused left arm back inside, crossed stiffly back to the bench, and sat. Still twitching slightly from the powerful shock, he returned his hand to its manacle, resettled the abused thumb, and contemplated the device nestled in his palm.

A few microchips, some wires, the powerful little speaker—this was enough. He could engineer an escape with no more than this. Possibly Talon had counted on that; he had said he wanted very much to kill his old teacher, after all. He would be waiting outside.

"_I am the terror—_" began the thing in his hand, and he snorted and split open the casing with a thumbnail, ready to start making use of his materials.

Across the room in the patch of shadow, well out of reach, another speaker began to hoot, triggered by the deactivation of the first.

Definitely intentional. And the Owlman smiled, because if it had possessed enough remote signal capacity to communicate even that much, it was going to be even more useful than he'd thought.


	3. If Not You

'If Not You'

* * *

"Why me?" Alexander Luthor grumbled, soldering a broken connection in his favorite power armor. Every single suit he'd ever built was currently trashed. War had left very little time for maintenance and repair. "I didn't do more than anybody else."

A loud, snorting laugh burst out behind him, from a man in a bright green suit who'd spent half the afternoon perched on his lab counter. "Easy, Lex," his friend said, voice packed full of grin. "They need a symbol. I'm too crazy and criminal, Grod's not human enough, Bob's an alien clone and ugly as sin, al Ghul and Ducard are foreign…"

Alex snorted behind his welding mask. "You can be so cynical for an idealist."

"Part of my charm. I love people, but I'm not going to pretend they're not _stupid_ a lot of the time. Sometimes even crazy!"

"And item one on the crazy meter, they're calling for me to be President."

"Well, Wilson's already had his two terms, and after the last year and a half, you can see how they want somebody hard to assassinate."

Alex grabbed another length of wire. "Oh, _that_ makes the job sound appealing. You know how much work it is? How would I ever get anything done?"

"I'm sure the POTUS can block off _some_ lab time."

"During a state of national emergency," Alex snorted. "Oh, certainly."

Jokester watched him work in silence for a minute or so. "Somebody needs to do it, Lex," he said, more solemnly than anyone usually ever heard him speak.

Alex groaned. "And if not me, then who? Is that the idea?" He shut off the soldering iron, set it aside, and pushed the mask up so he could fix the other man's flour-white face with a sour look. "And stop calling me that."

"It's alliterative. The press loves it." Gotham City's foremost hero cracked his knuckles. "Come on, Science Boy. We'll be behind you all the way."

"Catcalling and jostling and complaining every time I fail to veto a law you don't like, I know."

The clown shrugged, unapologetic, grinning hard. "Equality is hard to get right. I trust you a whole lot more than anyone else who could take the job." He leaned forward, not solemn now but very sincere. "Come on, Alex. This is your biggest chance to make a difference _ever._"

The inventor sighed. Here they stood, at the crossroads of history, with the wreckage of the past still cooling on some battlefields, and the future still uncertain. "I'll do it, J. You know I will." He pulled off the welding mask entirely and set it aside, closing the panel on the half-mended exosuit. He smiled, and it wasn't quite wry, or quite melancholy. "Do you think they'd still elect me if I picked Bob as my running mate?"

"I think there's a thirty percent chance they'd elect you if it meant the VP would be a one-eyed tomcat," Jokester snickered, flipping a flathead screwdriver end over end in one hand. "He _did_ help you take down Ultraman, shared weaknesses and all. They might go for it. He was made in the US. I'm not sure he'd want the job, though."

"Probably not," Alex admitted. "Last I heard he was in Hawaii. He says he's trying to be a real person. At least, that was what I got; his backwards talking can be tricky. He might be trying to be true to himself."

"Aren't we all," his old friend murmured. Smiling, of course.

Alex shoved him more than necessary in the process of reclaiming his screwdriver.

* * *

_**A/N: **Having introduced all the listed main characters besides Harley, plus Good!Luthor (who I have always had a huge soft spot for, so we'll be seeing him again, especially when we get around to the actual war), we can now start zipping around in time and space, fleshing out this Earth-3.  
_

_You can picture this fic as something like a box of mixed comics spread across about twenty-five years and several titles. ;D Although unlike the real version, if there's a missing issue you want filled in or a series you think should have been printed, you can put in a request and I, the magic cardboard box, will probably oblige._


	4. Freebird I: All the Dying Children

Freebird I: 'All the Dying Children'

* * *

The fancy little comlink device hit the munitions-warehouse floor, and a second later was crushed with prejudice under a long shiny shoe, whose owner grinned. Right, then. Talon was no longer wired, and he was still off-balance from the blow that had knocked the hardware out of his ear. No time like the present.

Going into a spin, Jokester slammed the kid against the corrugated iron wall. He knew his pin would only last so long, but hopefully long enough, and _hopefully_ this gamble wouldn't get anyone killed. Including him. "_Listen,_" he hissed. "We've been fighting for over a year now, kid, and I like to think I'm getting to know you pretty well."

Talon struggled silently.

This one spoke more often than the last one had; maybe it was his age. The first Talon had started appearing as the merest slip of a kid, years ago, before Jokester was even in the game, and had grown all the way up before he disappeared. Ten months after that this one had debuted, small again but not _nearly_ as small as the first time; J would now put him at maybe fourteen. Neither had ever been especially talkative, even compared to their boss. Of course, the Owl had been known to monologue occasionally, so that might not be the best comparison.

"You're not like the other one," J told the boy, winning a split second of stillness before his captive jerked harder, almost breaking his hold. Hating himself a little for it, Jokester moved his right hand with its joy-buzzer taser ring higher, closer to the boy's throat, knowing he'd feel a threat in the motion. Indeed, Talon's struggles grew more careful. Talons shrugged off a stabbing a lot easier than a jolt of electricity. "You're angry," Jokester added. His voice was barely loud enough to carry the few inches to Talon's ear. He didn't want the Owl overhearing, wherever he was. The others could only keep him busy so long.

"At me," he admitted. He'd had enough vicious injuries to prove that. "At everything. But especially _him_."

He paused just a moment, watching that blank assassin's face. "I don't know what he did to you. I don't know where he got you from, or who you are under there. I don't know what happened to the last kid.

"But if you ever want to get away, if you don't want to be this—you can come to us. We'll do whatever it takes to protect you, if you do."

Talon drew a breath through his teeth. The boys were denied the full-face masks that the Owl wore, the heavy armor that (rumor had it) had been the traditional uniform of Talon, before Owlman had shaken up the ancient Court and claimed it for himself, but so far as anyone could tell they were also denied any identity besides the Talon, and so had nothing to hide besides their expressions. And they rarely had any of those, either, beyond the occasional hungry grin, and even that was mostly the first one, when he'd still been small and acted a little bit like a child.

"Why?" the young killer of today demanded thickly.

"Because you're a kid. Because everybody deserves to be free."

Talon strained the same breath out again. Then he bucked, drove his forehead into Jokester's, brought a knee into his stomach, chopped at the back of his neck with one hand, and somersaulted away while the man recovered.

"Kid?" J asked, only a little gasping.

Lips pressed together, Talon flung a spread of shuriken to keep him back and grappled out through the broken window, withdrawing to his master's side.

Well, it wasn't 'never.' It wasn't even exactly 'no.'

* * *

"Did you mean it?" Talon asked, six months later. He had Jokester at his mercy this time, disarmed, bleeding from one shoulder, on one knee on one of the docks. His voice was low and expressionless, but there was something, some tension in it…J knew what he was asking.

"Always," he grinned, huffing for breath.

"I've killed a lot of people," Talon cautioned him, tipping his straight dagger with Jokester's blood along the edge so that it caught the dim light, gleaming crimson and silver. He didn't have his predecessor's style or uncanny grace, but he was terrible in his own way.

"I know." He wouldn't kill _him_, of course, not here or now, at least. The Owl hated the Jokester too much to allow that to any of his minions, even the best. His second stay at Arkham had been far more hellish and 1984 than the first, but he'd still escaped, no more broken than before. Owlman probably wouldn't risk it again, no matter how much he wanted to see anarchy brought to heel. He'd kill him himself. But he wouldn't delegate it.

"That's okay?" The boy didn't believe him.

"Of course it's not _okay._" Talon should be in high school. He should be doing homework and crushing on girls and all that stuff, or cutting class if he wanted, running up and down sidewalks, giving his friends noogies, eating an unhealthy amount of pizza. "But I don't _blame_ you. And anything can be forgiven."

Talon snorted. Twelve words was already just about the most Jokester had ever heard from him in one encounter, but he said, audibly derisive, "You Catholic?" He sounded more human than ever before, and Jokester felt something warm in his chest. He laughed aloud.

"Me? Something with that many rules?" He shook his head. "_Everybody_ deserves to be free." He tipped his head at Talon, eyebrows arcing high. _Coming?_ _Offer's open._

Talon shook his head. "Owlman wants you alive," he said, stepping forward, shoulders set with determination.

Jokester was disappointed, but he didn't let things get him down. "Well, at least he and I have _something_ in common," he cackled. And pushed a hidden switch.

In the ensuing explosion of the dock, he swam safely away. Hoping Talon wasn't punished too harshly for losing him.

* * *

They were in a warehouse again the next time Talon met his eyes.

It had been another four months since that night on the docks, and the boy was growing like a weed—J had surprised himself with a vaguely paternal interest in their youngest enemy at some point. Ed and Harley teased him about it, but she at least understood, and Harvey just told him not to let his guard down far enough to get killed. Waylon didn't care. Pam made no comment. It was being a father himself now, J suspected. You started to extend the constant concern to every titchy set of bones you met.

Right now most of that concern was focused on the five-year-old hostage in the middle of the empty floor. Her parents were Dominican immigrants and restaurant owners, and apparently too successful and courageous for their own good; they'd defied the Owl's demands for protection money—tithes, he called it, the pompous bag of feathers—and oaths of allegiance, and he'd sent his men to teach them the error of their ways.

The Ortices had gotten word to Jokester's crowd that they were going to need help, and they'd gotten there apparently in time, except that somehow in the melee Haskell—one of the Owl's more brutal subordinates; he'd worked for the Russian before Owlman's syndicate drove theirs out of business—had gotten his hands on the little daughter, and had a gun against her head. She was terrified. Her parents were desperate with fear.

_We don't even know her name,_ Jokester reflected bitterly, as he and all his people slowly raised empty hands in the air, knowing better than to call this a bluff.

Talon was in charge of this operation, technically, but neither Haskell nor at least a good half of the other seven hitters who'd been sent with him were at _all_ happy about answering to a kid. Driving that wedge further was, J judged, probably their best chance of getting everyone out alive.

The boy had a commanding enough posture, at least, as he waved Jokester, Harlequin, Enigma, Crocodile, and Janus into a corner, well away from their abandoned gear. J noted a heavy prybar lying abandoned within his reach, and resolved to make that his replacement weapon if he got a chance.

There didn't seem much chance of such an opening. "So," Haskell asked, not directing his question to his immediate superior but to his peers, "do you figure we should kill the freaks now, or should I finish the original job?"

"If we kill them while we still have a hostage, that's easier," said one of those peers, Civaldi, also conspicuously ignoring Talon. (And unreasonably overconfident in their ability to kill J and his friends at all, if they gave up the advantage of a hostage. Especially by _killing her in front of them_. Monsters. J cast a reassuring look at the grey-faced parents, hoping they'd wait and trust the heroes to find the right moment to move.)

"The boss wants at least one of them alive, though," argued Haskell, bouncing the little girl in the arm that held her against the gun, in a ghastly parody of actual childcare.

"Kneecaps," Civaldi proposed, turning his gun on Harley's athletic legs.

It was at this point that Talon backhanded him across the face, in passing, and came to a halt facing Haskell and his hostage. He was playing with a long knife in one hand, as he often did, and had eyes only for the girl he had apparently been sent to kill.

"Let me see…" Talon murmured, sliding the flat of his knife against the girl's dark, tearstained cheek. J's stomach lurched at the thought of her face cut like his had been, and it was so hard not to lunge forward in hopes of somehow overpowering them both before they could hurt her.

Then Talon's hand had flown upward, knocking the barrel of the gun up so hard and fast that it was pointed roofward before Haskell could jerk the trigger, and then his dagger had cut through the tendons in the man's elbow so he could no longer hold the weapon up to aim it at anything, and Talon plucked the Ortiz girl from his slackening hold and pivoted away, mule-kicking Haskell in the groin even as he tossed the child into her mother's astonished arms. Without hesitating, the boy spun from there to punch Civaldi in the throat.

Harlequin whooped, did a handspring feetfirst into the nearest enemy face. Ed, deprived of his precious stick, made do with a punch. Harvey, ever prepared, whipped a cosh from inside his jacket. Waylon didn't even _need _weapons. Jokester, cackling at the top of his lungs, scooped up the crowbar and got clobbering.

It was over in less than a minute, half Talon's squad taken out by him personally before the vigilante types got anywhere near them, and then he stood alone in the middle of the floor, everyone looking at him. His chest was heaving, and Jokester doubted it was primarily from exertion.

J strolled forward before the tension could grow too thick, clapped a hand on Talon's shoulder, which was allowed, though not precisely welcomed. "Taking me up on my offer, kid?" he asked heartily.

Talon nodded. "Last chance," he said, and J knew what he meant. Maybe he'd killed children before and maybe he hadn't, but if he'd gone through with this, when he had any chance of an out…Jokester would still have kept his promise, but it would have been harder. A lot harder. For both of them.

The boy's breathing steadied a little. He reached up to his face, dug with his fingernails, and ripped Talon's mask away, before looking back at J. His eyes were greeny-blue, and spoke a hundred times more than the rest of his face ever had.

"My name is Jason," he said.

Jokester glanced over the boy's shoulder, very briefly, gauging his wife's expression and those of his friends. They'd protect the boy either way, so long as they believed it wasn't a trick, but if what he'd done and been was too much for them to forgive, then he couldn't—nah, it was fine. Jokester's grin stretched all the way across his face, and he dragged the assassin recklessly into a one-armed hug.

"Welcome to the family, Jason." He squeezed once, let go, held the kid at arm's length. "Jaybird?" he tried, rolling the nickname around in his mouth. "How do you like 'Little J?'"

The lost, blindsided look faded from the ex-Talon's eyes in favor of irritation, and he rolled them. "I am so going to regret this, aren't I," he said, but not like he really meant it.

All of Jokester's friends laughed, even Harley where she'd gone over to reassure the Ortices and give the little girl any necessary medical treatment. "Don't be ridiculous," J chortled, clapping him once more on the bicep before turning him loose. "This is the best idea you ever had."

A slight smile bent Jason's stiff lips. "Yeah," he admitted. "Could be."


	5. Freebird III: Slice of the Pie

'Slice of the Pie' (aka Freebird II: 'Make My Heavy Heart Light')

* * *

_**A/N: **__This is set some two-and-a-bit months after the endpoint of 'Freebird: All the Dying Children.'  
_

* * *

It was a cold, bright night in Gotham.

Somewhat north of the city proper, the land rose sharply in low limestone hills, known for nearly three centuries as the Gotham Heights. They had been the site of a major battle of the American Revolution, but were long since given over to elegant homes. Many of the mansions of previous centuries had been replaced by high-end housing developments, real estate so near the city being what it was, and by far the finest of the edifices now standing was stately Wayne Manor, on sixty acres all encircled by stone and iron, and more subtle, modern security measures.

Tonight, the stars shone brilliantly on a heavy blanket of snow, keeping Christmastime vigil over Gotham. Only a few windows shone at the estate in the Heights, low and golden on the south side of the manor. From the window of the first-floor study, where a fire burned warm in the grate, the Gotham skyline could be seen glinting back at the stars, like a diamond necklace forgotten in the snow.

The master of the study sat with his back to the window, paging through business correspondence at the great wooden desk as though he had never heard of the holiday season. Eventually, however, the sound of his pen and the rustling of paper slowed and stopped. The grandfather clock tocked ponderously through the seconds, and the fire snapped, and all was still.

That state of affairs had lasted a good quarter hour already when the study door swung open, and the very upright figure of the household's only full-time employee entered silently with a tea-tray held before him, perfectly level. He set the tray on one end of the desk, poured from the silver teapot into the sole waiting cup, and passed it on its saucer into his employer's reach.

"Merry Christmas, Mister Wayne."

The benediction was met with a small hum of acknowledgement, and the tips of the master's fingers found the edge of the saucer, but he did not look away from the portrait of a young couple that hung over the mantle. The butler followed his look, and his professional demeanour softened slightly.

"They loved you very much, sir."

"One would hope," Bruce Wayne replied, lightly, as though to rebuff the suggestion that he was vulnerable to sentiment, tore his eyes from the picture and took a sip of steaming tea.

"Mince pie, sir?" the butler asked, lifting the rounded silver cover from a plate.

One corner of his employer's lips twitched in amusement. "Tradition, I suppose," he allowed dryly. He glanced at the wedge of pastry, but did not reach for the delicate dessert fork poised beside it, merely sipped again at his gleaming cup.

The older man hovered for a moment beside the desk, his duty complete for the moment, and then rather than leaving he spoke again. "Will young master Talon be making an appearance? He seemed to enjoy his slice of mince last year."

Irritation chased contemplation off the billionaire's face. "He came to make a report, not celebrate pointless holidays. And no, Alfred. Talon will not be appearing ever again." The old man's eyes widened, and Wayne elaborated with viciously perfect enunciation, "He failed me. Like the one before him."

There was a grey tinge to the old butler's face. "That poor boy," he murmured.

"He wasn't a child, Pennyworth."

"Too young," the man replied, "to be a soldier."

Wayne shrugged. "Talon is a _weapon_. So it has been since Gotham's first bricks were laid. Tradition," he added pointedly. "The people are cowardly and superstitious, and all they understand is fear. Talon exists to create that fear."

Pennyworth's mouth pinched. "Your family was never part of that particular tradition, sir."

"One can always improve upon any institution. At any rate, do not waste your sentiment on Talon. This one may have been a poor choice, and somewhat lacking in discipline, but at a single word from me he would have cut your throat. Am I understood?"

"Perfectly."

"Good." Wayne placed his half-full teacup on its saucer forcefully back on the tea-tray and met his butler's eyes. "Dismissed."

Alfred Pennyworth gathered up the tea service and the untouched pie and carried them to the door. Paused with it open before passing from the room. "You do know that my loyalty has never been because I _feared_ you…Master Bruce."

The last two words were as gentle as they were pointed, the form of address the old man had once used for the child his employer had been, the closest thing to an endearment that had ever passed between them, and Bruce Wayne was left staring at a closed door for several seconds before he scowled, and turned his back on it. His eyes landed again on the portrait above the mantle and he looked away at once, brooding into the fire for a moment before rising angrily from his desk and rounding on the window that overlooked Gotham. From this distance, the city seemed peaceful, wrapped in white light and clean snow and goodwill toward man, but the Owl's lips twisted in a frustrated sneer. Diamond necklace, they called it? Cheap paste, at best. But _his_. And loose in his city were far too many rats.

The fire crackled softly, and one man stood alone.

* * *

At the same time, somewhere in Gotham's East End, another man stood on a shabby footstool, trying to get the attention of everyone in a crowded, noisy little room, and grinning, as only he could, from ear to ear.

His beautiful wife had made pumpkin pie with real cream and butter and fresh roasted pumpkin, the way she said her mother used to, and Cobblepot had sent over a crate of British Christmas crackers and brandy as a professional courtesy, which had resulted in a lot of delightful sharp banging noises and paper crowns. Only a few of the attendees stood enough on their dignity not to be wearing one. He clapped his hands over his head a few times for attention and bounced on his toes, and the conversations and honking of a noisemaker tailed off, and somebody turned down the music.

He grinned again, pulled a notebook out of his breast pocket, and gestured grandly with the attached pen. "Thank you, thank you. It is with great pleasure that I call this gathering to…well, order seems unlikely, but a sort of loose organization. Waylon's with his mother, I know, and Ed said he'd be late. Harley?"

"Here, you great lunk," she told him fondly, handing a slice of pie up to the woman next to her, who was wearing a green paper crown with the grace of a queen.

"Pam?" Jokester asked, continuing earnestly down his (entirely blank) list.

"Present," affirmed the source of the pumpkins. "Which you know perfectly well."

"Hush, Red," Harlequin advised her. "This is a ritual. Process over result."

She knew him so well.

"Jon?" he carried on.

"Yes," said the long thin man tucked up beside the potbellied stove. He was the quiet type, when he wasn't talking about his work, but he smiled back at J, which was good enough.

"Harv?"

"I say thee both yes and no," deadpanned the former attorney. He got more and more sarcastic as he relaxed, and might have been slightly tipsy already. It was good brandy.

Jokester made a show of checking both imaginary boxes by Harvey's name. "J?" he asked next. "Present," he answered himself promptly. "Little J?" There was a brief silence. "Little J?"

"I am never answering to that." The boy in question felt more than secure enough by now to glower up at the ringleader of their little freakshow. He'd taken to bulking himself up in layers, heavy steel-toed boots and stiff leather jackets and quite often when outdoors a strong red motorcycle helmet because, he said, the Talon uniform was so close to being underwear it made no difference, and he was done freezing his ass off.

Harley figured there was a lot of psychological defensiveness being expressed there, but it _was _December.

Jason would have looked more intimidating without the six-year-old girl sprawled across his legs, pale brown curls pooling near one knee around crumpled purple tissue paper. Ella had decided this new playmate was the best possible early Christmas present, and Jason had displayed a touching inability to refuse her anything, including space on his sofa.

"Present," J marked down with his nonexistent pen. Jaybird had known he meant him, and acknowledged it. He had already surrendered to the inevitable, even if he didn't admit it yet. He'd laugh in ten years when Jokester trotted the name out. Right now, he grumbled.

"Complaining just makes it worse," Harvey advised him, making a small toast with his brandy glass. He would know; Jokester had rejected his first couple pseudonyms out of hand and refused to use any of them, especially Harvey's personal favorite. Only a lawyer would think 'The Bicameral Man' was a good idea. A _geeky_ lawyer.

Ella bounced impatiently against Jason's knees. "Daaadyyy!" she nagged. _She_ liked the list—got really into roll call at school—and her turn was being postponed by the endless digressions of grownups. J winked at her.

"Princess Ella?"

"Here!" she squealed, her hand shooting into the air and narrowly missing Jason's nose.

The nose wrinkled and its owner plastered himself against the back of the couch, which was a much more restrained reaction than he'd have been able to manage even a month ago. Six-year-old was _best _exposure therapy, but he _was_ looking a little overwhelmed again, now. Operation intervention back in session. "That's everybody!" J exclaimed.

"Hurray!" his little girl shouted, joined by a chorus of less explosive cheers from around the room, because she had everybody in their circle wrapped around her finger.

But _he _was still Daddy. With that thought, he threw the blank notebook over his shoulder, hopped off his tiny footstool stage, and swept Ella off Jaybird's sofa, unfortunately leaving the purple crown behind. "You ready for pie?" he asked, while the kid breathed a sigh of relief and then grinned crookedly up at the pair of them. He was getting better and better at looking alive. Within the year, J meant to break him of defaulting back to that blank Talon expression.

Ella shook her head. "Waiting for ice cream," she declared. Pumpkin pie was indeed best with ice cream; his little girl had excellent taste.

"Who's a little princess?" he teased, tapping her nose.

"Jason!" came the pert reply, and since there was no way he could top that punchline, J slung her over his arm and tickled her to delighted shrieks until the front door rattled open to admit a windswept Ed Nigma with a grocery bag slung over one arm. "Ice cream's here!" J announced, and set Ella on her feet with a kiss on the top of her head.

He flopped to the floor as she ran over to demand to be served her pie and ice cream, even as the door was shoved closed against the cold, leaned his head back against Harley's knee, and even if his face had never been cut open and sewn back together, he wouldn't have been able to stop smiling.

It was okay that Santa played favorites. He had everything he could possibly want.

* * *

_**A/N: **Mm. __The main contrast between hero and villain in Gotham is still the canon order/chaos dichotomy, but being good has granted J access to the Power of Friendship, and being evil has largely divested Bruce of surrogate family, so this also. ^^ Of course, it helps that unlike Batman, Jokester believes in happiness. To an unreasonable degree, even.  
_

_Ella's not an OC, by the way, although she's not that recognizable yet so props if you've placed her, and I didn't make up the geography, either. __Civilians in this 'verse are generally not mirrored, so Alfred is still Alfred, while Bruce is evil and Jonathan Crane is shy. (Apparently Croc's mom didn't die in this timeline and so he wasn't raised by his psychotic abusive aunt, which probably made not being evil easier. This is my excuse for forgetting his backstory completely when I wrote that line, because I wanted to keep it.)  
_


	6. Red Hood IV: Glasgow

Red Hood IV: 'Glasgow'

* * *

_**A/N: **The chapter I wanted to put before this one is being difficult, and I wanted to post _something_ on my birthday, so have some origin story. ^^ Diego de la Vega is Zorro's secret ID; rich idiot with no day job, giving him plenty of leisure to aid the oppressed against corrupt politicians and landlords. _

_Warning for some gruesome, but nobody dies._

* * *

'_The King's argument was, that anything that had a head could be beheaded, and that you weren't to talk nonsense.' _–Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

* * *

The problem with masks that were convenient to take on and off, J realized, as gravel crunched underfoot and the night wind touched his bare face, was that they weren't just convenient for you.

He grinned at Owlman even as the big bully tossed his nice shiny new crimson-polyurethane helmet aside like trash. "Hey, Feathers."

"So this is the Red Hood." The Owl raked cold eyes over him like a handful of talons, enumerating fine brown hair that flopped over big stupid ears; nose and chin too long for good looks; hazel eyes bloodshot; teeth slightly crooked; dismissed it all. "Disappointing."

"Well, I wanted to be Diego de la Vega, but I didn't have the budget." J cracked his neck as an excuse to survey the scrubby lot outside Ace Chemicals, where he had definitely not intended to be tonight. The ocean lapped at the edge of hearing, almost drowned out by traffic on the overpass, but there were no nearby signs of human presence.

This wasn't good, he knew. It wouldn't be great even if it was just the two of them, Owlman having a conservative fifty pounds of muscle on him in addition to body armor and edged weapons, but Talon was here, too, with perfect, even little teeth flashing like fangs in a wolf's jaw, hungry for blood. Talon never got angry, and he was only four feet tall, but honestly J would rather fight the boss.

Not that they were courteous enough to offer him a choice of partners.

They closed in from both sides, with the leisurely, confident stride of apex predators. Sort of feathery tigers, which was almost funny enough an image to cheer him up. The kids they'd used as bait had scattered already, at least; J wasn't sure if they'd been hired or ambushed, but the owlcat duo had lost interest in them as soon as J got into the open, and the kids'd had the sense to get out while they could. He fell back, knowing he would be cornered against the factory in another couple of yards. Needed a plan.

He'd been unmasked, which wasn't great, but they clearly wanted something besides his identity, such as it was. He had a policy of not giving them what they wanted.

"Running away?" the Owl mocked, took another step, and this was going _nowhere_ fast.

"Well, hehe, you know what they say about he who fights and runs away…"

J bolted, scattering marbles behind him as he went. Made it to the corner of the building without getting a throwing star in the back, swarmed up the chain-link fence and leaped from there, froglike and inelegant, onto the roof of the low shed adjoining the factory proper, and slithered through a half-open window into catwalks designed for the maintenance of giant halogen lights that were, at the moment, dark.

J crouched in dimness lit only by some virulently green vats roiling thirty feet below, whatever _that _was about, and tried to plan. This was the first time the Owl had come looking for _him;_ usually it was Red Hood messing with Owlman's plans, so he went into those encounters with all the gear he could possibly use, and several tricks in store. Right now, he had _nothing_; he'd been on his way home from giving Dulcita and Amacita a hand with convincing yet another pimp that they did not belong to him, and those marbles outside and the tire iron Talon had taken off him in the initial tangle were basically all the stuff he'd had left.

Nothing he needed to stick around and fight for in this trap, but how could he get out of here without being spotted? How long were they likely to keep looking?

A shadow moved in against the darkness in the corner of his right eye. "Aw, darn," he groaned, as the tiny ninja death machine slammed into him and sent him right over the edge of the catwalk in a flutter of dark red cape.

He landed flat on his back on a lower, wider catwalk, at Owlman's feet. They _totally_ planned that. Seriously, if they weren't such utter _bastards _he could really appreciate their show-people flair. "Heya," he waved up, somewhat out of breath, and started to roll to his feet. The Owl kicked his hands from under him halfway through, and as his chin bruised on the walkway, planted a boot in the middle of his back. Ooh. He was starting to miss breathing.

"Are you afraid yet?"

"I guess I've got kind of a suspicion tonight's not looking to be a party," J admitted. "'zat count?"

Talon landed behind him, soft as a cat, and J's attempt to wriggle under the guardrail and lose himself under the catwalks and vats came to nothing under Owlman's heel.

"If you're too stupid to learn fear, at least we can make an example of you."

Definitely not a party.

The boy held his legs down. He probably couldn't have achieved anything by kicking anyway, but he would have liked a chance to try. J felt a bare-skinned childish knee digging into the back of his thigh and wondered if Talon was still smiling. Normally he liked smiles, but not that one. He gave his best shot at a mighty thrash.

But Owlman had a knee of his own in his spine and a boot on his outstretched arm, and the other arm twisted by a great strong hand on his wrist until the tendons screamed, and he'd gotten overconfident and now he was going to die. _Drat, _he thought.

Just that, like he'd missed the day when they were selling mint ice cream on special, or the new episode of one of his favorite TV shows; a sort of sharp pang of disappointment at missing out. Guess that's it; had a good run, old boy. We barely knew ye. _Drat. _

And, _I hope someone returns my library books._

And then there was a heavy gauntlet taking a fistful of hair, thumb rough against the back of his ear as his head was wrenched up, and then cold steel between his lips and _pain._

He screamed, but the scream broke after the first seconds, broke and screeched out of him in fits of agonized, disbelieving laughter. As something desperate and animal in him kicked fruitlessly against Talon's grasp and locked neck muscles to keep his other cheek pressed safely to the floor, as blood poured down his throat and choked him, he laughed and laughed.

His neck couldn't stand long against the strength of Owlman's arm, of course, and he found himself all too soon gasping into a pool of blood, with the flaps of severed cheek muscle folded back against themselves by the rough force bearing down. Fresh-sliced flesh crunched between his teeth and the freezing walkway, a single rivet clicking obscenely against the side of an exposed molar, and the knife was set again to the remaining corner of his mouth.

"Beg for mercy," the Owl rumbled. Barely bothering to imply there was a chance of it being granted.

J could see the man's stony face out the corner of his right eye, lips expressionless as any beak, soulless round eyes and those stupid little ear-tuft points at the top. His snigger came out as a sort of bubbling whinny. "Y'mushht bhe jhokin."

_Slice._

It should have been easier the second time. He knew what to brace himself for.

It was worse.

"That should teach you to smile," grated the Owl, as they let him go. There wasn't even time to fill his lungs and wonder if it was over before the same hard hands flipped him over, lifted him by the front of his shirt, and held him, one handed, against the safety railing, like he was a scarecrow full of nothing but straw, and not a person stuffed with blood and guts and awkwardly jutting bone.

Owlman's grim look bent into a smirk for just a second, and he reached up with the other hand, took him by the chin in a cool, deliberate gesture that was not quite gentle, and _jerked_ clenched teeth apart, so that the muscles tore that half-inch more toward the hinge of J's jaw with a soft, meaty rip that seemed to startle even Talon. _Glasgow grin. Cheshire smile. Very traditional. Everyone's mad here._

And maybe that would have been all, if he had whimpered or begged or even been silent, his ruined face the example, a lesson in the price of defiance that would persist the rest of his life, whenever anyone saw him. If he'd done anything the Owl could take as victory.

But instead he laughed, an inhuman bark spilling from the wide lipless gash that was now his mouth, because Owlman had never understood, would never understand the sheer _absurdity_ of it all, of his own brutal serious self.

"Y' don' ged i', duh ya?" he bubbled as he hung there, snickering, looking death in the face and unable, no matter how he tried, unable to be afraid.

"What?" demanded the Owl, his voice so deep and hollow and nothing like the uncanny shriek of the real bird. "What do you think I don't understand?"

"Why," J gasped out, shaking with laughter that was beginning to hurt almost as much as his face, tears prickling from his eyes and trickling down to mingle with the blood, and sting salty in the wounds. It really sounded more like _ouuhaih_, but it seemed like he was understood, and the Owl stood there, holding him, waiting for the question.

"_Why_," J said again. Blinked tears out of his eyes and tried to smile, even though it hurt more than anything he could ever remember, tugging at muscles that ended now in screaming emptiness, and he couldn't even imagine how he looked. He bent his head forward, and his captor was human enough to respond a little to the cue, closing the space between them a fraction to listen to J whisper:

"_Why did the Owl cross the road?_"

Teeth a bird shouldn't have ground with sudden fury, and J burst out laughing once again, loud and wild and hyena-high, droplets of blood speckling the Owl's feathered mask and broad chin. "Doncha geddit?" he asked. "Ya know th' _punshline_?"

"We're done here," said the serious, _serious_ man.

And threw him over the rail.

Roiling green hissed as it closed over him, and he had less than an instant to understand before his whole world became pain. He could close his eyes but not the slashes in his face. And the acid was flowing in as the blood was flowing out and this was _exactly_ what it felt like to be eaten alive.

Whether the Owl and his Talon stayed for an hour or a minute, it was all one. Whether he escaped the vat somehow, without remembering, or was discovered, fished out, and hastily dumped away from the factory before anyone could lose their job, it hardly mattered. He came to with the soft lap of the surf pouring salt on his acid-burned limbs like a curse from his oldest friend, and dragged himself a second time from the sea.

Gotham took him back, as she always, always would.

* * *

**A/N:** _Hero origin. They tend to hurt. ^^ __The bit where he first got to Gotham and the bit where he got to be Red Hood will appear later. __Not merely a product of my diseased mind, btw; this is a flashback panel from the _Countdown to Final Crisis _Earth-3, with slight alterations__, and with the Joker acid bath included. A Glasgow Grin is apparently 'traditionally' accomplished by cutting the corners of the mouth and then wrenching the jaw as wide as it will go, so the flesh splits. Brrr. Happy Birthday to me, and thanks for reading.  
_


	7. Fail Better

'Fail Again; Fail Better.'

* * *

**_Boomph!_ **

On a certain chilly late morning in March, a ramshackle old brownstone in Gotham's East End shook with a muffled explosion, and brilliantly purple smoke began to spill from every crack and window, starting from the top down. A few seconds later, people began to spill after it, coughing and staggering and broadcasting various degrees of irritation.

"_Goddammit_, Jon!" exclaimed one of the smallest figures, tossing yellow hair. "I don't mind a little healthy chaos, but if you're going to keep blowing up _someone's_ headquarters, why don't you go back to the drug dealers we sprung you from, and do it to them?"

"Harley," remonstrated the man in the green bowler hat, who was about her size.

"Sorry," mumbled the rake-thin man who'd emerged last, hunching against cold or recrimination or both.

"All _I_ want to know," grumbled the largest of the lot, folding his great scaly arms, "is are we gonna start hallucinating again?"

"Ah, not this time," said the thin man, fingers drumming nervously at nothing. "It's just—I thought you could use—like ninjas, you know?"

The man in the hat chuckled, leaned over to pat him on the back. "Oh, J will _love_ him some smoke bombs. Especially if they match his hair. You're fine, Jon. Just keep doing your best." He shot a fierce look at the blonde woman, who bit her lip, contrite.

"Sorry," she said. "You made Ella's birthday cake fall, is all. Ed's right, we'd never send you back, don't worry. Let's just…find you some lab space that isn't in the attic. Okay? I'm tired of explosions, and leaking purple smoke isn't exactly…subtle. This is supposed to be a safehouse."

The big man snorted, and when his friends looked at him questioningly, swung his tail in a wry circle around the empty street. "Neighbors are so used to us blowing stuff up, nobody even came out to look."

Even the thin man gave a narrow grin at that. "So," he concluded, nodding.

"Lab space," the little man reiterated cheerfully, squinting through thinning lavender wreaths of haze and flipping off his hat to fan at it. "You could share mine, but the computers really don't like smoke, and I foresee that being a pretty unresolvable conflict."

"Still time to start over and finish the new cake before clownlet gets home from school," the big scaly man rumbled to the blonde as they made their way back toward the door. Overhead, a string of geese complained their way steadily, optimistically north. "And I'll eat the flat one."

"So very helpful of you, Waylon," she drawled. "What _ever_ would I do without you."

Waylon poked his nose over the threshold and gave a cautious sniff. "Cake is a two-person job?"

Harley shrugged. "You can eat the fallen one, if you'll clean out the pans and re-grease them while I'm mixing."

"Birthday cakes," the man with the hat informed tall, twiggy Jon, as they followed the other two back in, "are serious business around here."

Jon said, "I hate greasing pans."

They left the door open behind them, to let the rest of the smoke out, and the brisk wind followed them inside, smelling of city and sky.

* * *

_**A/N: **__Does this count as fluff? I think it's fluff. It probably falls sometime within the ten-month 'Freebird' time span. Thought I'd put out something light after last chapter. Scarecrow's full backstory is pretty far down the priority list and will probably never get posted, unless someone is vitally interested. Also, I made a continuity gaffe last chapter; Harvey's disfigurement comes _after_ Jokester's, not before. Cannot be refered to in the moment. Whoops. The error has been fixed. My timeline is very cross with me.  
_


	8. And the Outlaws

'…And The Outlaws'

* * *

**A/N: **_This one's dedicated to RaggleFraggle, who gave me the idea. Set maybe a month after 'The Owl and the Dead Boy,' which was set about two weeks after the end of that war people keep mentioning. Apologies to the city of Detroit and to anyone who minds swearing._

* * *

The rusted fire escape snapped under his foot, and Roy swore, emphatically but under his breath, as he caught himself on frame and railing without putting too much weight on any one part of the totally-not-up-to-code piece of crap, and eased himself onto the roof proper. Tar paper should not be so reassuring under a guy's feet. Rust belt was right. Fuck Detroit.

"Roy Harper," said a cool voice, and Roy pretty much had a fucking heart attack. The speaker, leaning comfortably against a massive air-conditioning unit that probably hadn't worked since the eighties, did not seem impressed by the gun pointed straight at his chest. Powered, or just nervy? "You're Oliver Queen's right-hand man," he added.

Roy lowered the gun but didn't take his finger off the trigger, or put it away. The man didn't seem to be armed, but he could be hiding anything in that big grey coat, and with the hood up, all you could see was his mouth. "I was. Queen's dead." He might even miss the guy slightly, if he ever had time to catch his breath—total bastard, but fun to work with.

"Long live the queen," replied the stranger, lips quirking to the side. Oh, a funny guy, on top of all the mysterious appearing and declaring.

"Was there something you wanted, or are you just here to annoy me?"

"You're planning on cleaning out the bank on Woodward," said the guy. "Don't."

"Oh, so you're one of _those_ types," Roy sneered. The insurgency and their stupid hackers had managed to seize more of his and Queen's emergency assets than he'd ever expected—he wasn't going to be desperate enough to walk into an open bank with a gun and a heist note anytime soon, but a midnight vault raid was sounding good. He'd never done well at keeping his head down.

"They're declaring bankruptcy," said Mystery Guy, without missing a beat. "The building's in foreclosure. It's not worth it. Go for the place up on Woodward and Michigan."

Roy blinked, reassessing. "Who the hell are you?"

Advice Guy finally raised his head and smiled from under the hood. Dark hair, blue eyes; about Roy's age. "Richard Grayson," he said easily. "I used to be Talon."

"You're the guy Wilson's been tearing up the country for for the last ten years." The former President had thrown a giant fit when it had turned out, after the dust of worldwide civil war settled, that none of the defeated black hats had any more idea where the assassin that killed his kid was now than his white hats had ever had. That Talon had been off-grid so long Roy had figured he was dead.

"Owlman's on the loose again," Grayson shrugged, bland. "I'm a little fish in comparison."

"Convenient for you."

Grayson pulled a little face, but also pulled back the hood of his coat. "I guess."

"So what do you want?" Roy asked. He'd have folded his arms, if it wouldn't have meant taking an extra second or so to shoot the man in the head if he tried anything. He was confident in his own abilities, but Talon was a _nightmare_. Famously so. Grayson might have gone to seed in ten years—he'd screwed up bad enough in the White House, come to think of it—but he might just have gotten better, and Roy wasn't going to risk letting his guard down around that kind of death machine. Another ex-Talon had handed him his ass once when Roy had taken him lightly, and Red Hood was a _punk_. Grayson he couldn't get a read on, and that was not reassuring.

"I can't just be a good neighbor?"

"Cut the crap."

"We worked together a couple of times when we were kids," Grayson shrugged, pushing away from the bulk of defunct technology at his back like he was finally taking this conversation seriously.

Roy remembered meeting Talon, when he'd been seventeen and Grayson must have been a couple of years younger, a slim little shard of black-and-red death that almost never said a word. He wouldn't have called either of them kids.

"You're a good operative," said used-to-be-Talon casually, "but you're not grasping the fugitive headspace. You're going to get yourself hauled in by the end of next month at this rate."

"Fuck you very much. So what's in it for you?"

"Well, I could use another pair of hands," Grayson began. "Working solo gets old after a while."

"So…you scratch my back, I scratch yours?"

"More or less."

"I see. There's just one problem." (Actually, there were like half a dozen, the most pressing being that he didn't trust Mister Mysterious here half as far as he could throw him.)

Pink light broke over the rooftop then, like dawn come early, and Roy grinned. Perfect timing. "I'm not working alone."

"Arsenal," said a cold female voice.

Roy's shoulders had relaxed. He regretted his choice of team-up sometimes, when she was being high-strung or throwing cars at trucks or demanding he get up and help her with something, but there was no security on Earth like having a flying tank for backup. "Hey partner," he greeted, not quite taking his eyes off the renegade assassin ten feet away.

Who didn't seem all that surprised, to Roy's mild disappointment. Had he been spying on them for a while, or just since they'd hit Detroit? It was probably her he was angling for, anyway; Roy was good, but not exactly a unique resource. "Hey," Grayson threw in.

"You," Kori said flatly. Grayson gave a little wave, and Roy scowled.

"You know each other?"

"She was my first kiss," Grayson twinkled, suddenly all alive with humor.

Kori rolled her eyes, which was a human gesture Roy wished she'd never decided to imitate, because it really didn't work when your eyes were one solid glowing green. "I needed Earth languages besides Greek, and you were presented to provide the English. It was not a gesture of affection. Talon," she greeted him, a little more friendly than the 'you.'

"Richard," he corrected. "_Please. _Are you still going by 'Nuclear Fusion?'"

"Starfire," she corrected in turn. "Koriand'r, to my friends."

"Coriander," Grayson repeated. Okay, that accent was _not_ going to win him points.

"_You_ are not my friend. Yet," she allowed generously, and turned to Roy. "He's helping?"

"He says we're incompetent," Roy replied.

"I did not!" Grayson protested.

Roy shrugged. Assuming it was given in good faith, the information _was_ helpful. "He says we should target a different bank. Apparently the one on Woodrow is empty."

"Annoying. But it makes no difference, does it? You will get inside and disable security, and I will break the vault door and do the heavy lifting."

"Well, I'll have to start my tac survey over," Roy allowed, wishing she had more discretion in front of the outsider. "So we can't hit the place tonight."

"I can help there," Grayson volunteered, and Roy frowned at him.

"Why help us?" Kori asked, so Roy didn't have to again.

"Like I told Arsenal," he answered easily. "It's been a while since I've had any kind of backup, and the new government is stirring things up, now that the worst of the war cleanup is over. Same reason you two need to learn how to be invisible."

Roy had been 'invisible' plenty, under Queen, but a lot of the details had been either handled by the judicious application of cash, or by syndicate infrastructure he'd barely noticed himself relying on. Grayson leaned back against his air conditioner, put his head to one side, and asked the still-hovering Kori, "What about you?"

"Me?" she asked, puzzled.

He shrugged. "I know why I'm on the run, and it isn't likely to change, and Harper makes sense too, but what about you?"

"'Nuclear Fusion' was associated with atrocities in the war and the years before it," she shrugged. "I am wanted. And recognizable," she added pointedly. She didn't stick out as much as some aliens, but between orange skin and glowing green eyes she needed a burqa to pass for human. Which was a dodge they had used a couple of times, actually. She'd stolen Farsi off a startled newspaper vendor to help make it plausible.

"You were under coercion with the Society, though," Grayson pointed out, proving that once again he knew _way too much_ about shit. "They'd probably acquit you if you came to trial. Especially if you agreed to join one of the new enforcement teams as part of your plea bargain."

Kori snorted. "Or they might not, and I do not _wish_ to serve any new Earth government as a weapon. I was brought to this world a slave. I feel no allegiance to its petty, inconstant laws, and no debt to its selfish little people." Grayson nodded, a look of deep understanding on his face. It was actually starting to creep Roy out, how he kept going from total blankness to exactly, precisely the right expression for the moment. It was like the guy had to intentionally turn his face on to make it work.

He thought about the dozen or so times he'd met Owlman's Talons over the years. Huh. Maybe he did.

"I remain here only until I find a way to return to my own world, and my rightful place as ruler."

Roy had heard it all before, but Grayson seemed honestly interested. "You never mentioned you were royalty."

"What did it matter? Superwoman, may she rot in chains forever, only saw it as another reason to gloat over my bondage." Kori shook her head. "For now, we are on Earth, and you will teach Arsenal and I how to live the lives of outlaws on this world. I will _not_ be captured again."

And that, Roy knew, was that. "Welcome to the team, I guess," he shrugged, without even a warning frown. Grayson had stayed free through ten years on the Most Wanted list, without even surfacing on the underworld radar. Roy could deal with his personality to get those skills, and it wasn't like Kori was going to give him a choice.

For the first time, Grayson seemed a little surprised, and blinked once before smiling for real. "Team, huh? I guess we need a troupe name," he said. "Flying...no, 'Grayson and the Flying Outlaws,' maybe?"

"I can't fly," Roy deadpanned.

"Are we a troop?" asked Kori. "On Tamaran, a troop must be at least five."

"And who said you were lead singer here, anyway?" Roy threw in.

Their new collaborator let out a cracked little laugh, and they spent the next few minutes bickering over the name of something that Roy would never have thought of naming. Grayson let himself get peeled off the front without much fuss, but he hung fast to the flying part even though it was completely stupid, and both guys appealed to Kori to take their side, which she declined to do, which probably meant she liked it but didn't want to side with the new guy against Roy. In the end they dropped the issue for the moment, and got down to the nitty-gritty of robbing Charter One bank.

Grayson really did know his stuff.

* * *

_**A/N: **So…they're villains, with the killing and robbing and all, but the fact that I love all three of them to death kind of came through. Jason has a family and hero status in this 'verse, and Dick's the shadowy fugitive, so when the Outlaws were requested, this happened. This required revisions to my previous concept of what he's been doing since he split after the Wilson incident, but I like it._

_'_Nuclear Fusion' is a terrible but technically accurate translation of Koriand'r that I thought made a great villain name.___ Evil Diana is a giant jerk. Kori and Roy now also have detailed mirror backstories; I think the Flying Outlaws will be back.  
_

_^^ Thanks here to my two repeat anon-reviewers the loquacious 'anon' and the laconic 'Rachel', as well as to RaggleFraggle and everyone else. This fic is abnormal and all-over-the-place enough that without feedback, I have no idea what people are thinking about it, so I love you guys and all your input.  
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	9. Red Hood I: Dundee

Red Hood I: 'Dundee'

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_**A/N: **__Chronologically earliest chapter yet! Timeline lands this about three years **before** '_Glasgow,' _when J gets himself carved a new face. And apparently now chapters from this era are named after places in Scotland. (Chapters are hereby vulnerable to being retroactively renamed for organizational purposes.)_

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Only once the last lingering patrons trickled out to the closing strains of 'Bridge Over Troubled Water' did the musician fall silent.

His fingers were stinging from the strings, he realized, and he smiled as he shook them out, arched his back until it cracked, and dropped over the edge of the little corner stage. There was a thin scattering of ones and a few fives and an assortment of change in his open guitar case, and he raked it together and thrust it into a pants pocket before unslinging his instrument from his shoulders and setting it carefully into its place. Only then did he reach into the hidden pocket in the lining and draw out a long, red scarf.

He could have left hours ago. Really, besides what people threw in the case, he'd only been paid to be here til eleven. But there was something so compelling about an audience, an audience that was _listening_ and _enjoying_ the show, and he didn't have anywhere else to be for another forty minutes or so. No reason not to keep playing until the bartenders closed up shop. (They used to get mad if he didn't stop at least half an hour before that, because it made people stay later at no profit and they had to wait around to lock up, but now he had a key.)

Jack—provisional name only; he was still _John _to Edna and _Jim _to his friends at the university, and because Alonzo was a butthead he wouldn't drop _Jamie, _but he was test-driving _Jack_ at the moment and liked the feel of it—gave the wooden face of the guitar a fond little pat before zipping up its case. He wasn't especially good, not really, and he knew it, but the instrument was by far his most valued possession.

When he'd saved up a couple hundred dollars by the end of his first year in Gotham, through the kind of stubborn scrimping you could only manage when you were youngish, healthy, had no dependents, it had been a choice between getting a set of fake ID good enough to maybe get him a regular, legal minimum-wage job, or putting about half in for the nice acoustic guitar somebody had pawned at Rico's, and chipping the rest into the pot to pay for Kate's baby daughter's cleft-palate surgery. He'd decided the ID could wait.

Three months later he wasn't sorry, even though he was really wanting to get off the docks.

Currently-Jack didn't mind manual labor or anything, but when you didn't have any kind of ID you could only work under the table, which meant either _extremely_ terrible pay or seriously illegal stuff. Since he was kind of uncomfortable unloading crates of guns that might wind up shooting people he knew, he was mostly stuck with the terrible pay, and he wasn't liking this for the long term.

The guitar, though. It was its own way out.

From the very beginning, he'd spent more time than he could really afford dawdling around listening to buskers playing their streetcorners and train stations, and his friends kept telling him things like he ought to be on the stage, get his own comedy act, go on TV, and these things together had led him to the discovery of the _other_ poorly-regulated field he was slightly qualified for: live entertainment. He'd polished his act up at a series of parties and open mic nights, kept cadging music lessons and doggedly plucking away at borrowed instruments until he got his own, and even before he'd started to get any money, he'd known this was the best idea ever. Hey-presto, _Jack-has-a-trade!_

Doctor Thompkins at the Park Row clinic said he must have been the kind of kid who found the tallest thing to stand on, anywhere he went, and shouted _look at me, everybody! Look at me! _She'd said this after he fell out of a tree in Robinson Park and cracked his ulna, and he'd sort of shrugged because who knew, but she was probably right.

…he kind of hoped she was right.

His buddy Roman had gotten him this steady Friday night gig in his uncle's bar—fifty dollars a night plus whatever people were inspired to donate, for four hours of live music and a stand-up comedy routine at eight that was starting to draw an actual crowd, these last few weeks.

It was two AM and everybody had gone home, and it was just him and Roman and Roman's half-empty bottle of vodka.

Jack smiled. It was now time to get on with his third job, the one that paid absolutely zilch. With the smoothness of a lot of practice, he started wrapping the scarf around his face, brilliantly crimson and delightfully soft. Roman watched and sipped at his glass as Jack-at-the-moment covered his slightly-distinctive eyebrows, and then passed a fold of cotton over the bridge of his nose.

His face wasn't that memorable, or recorded in any databases anywhere, but just because he was nobody didn't mean he wanted the people he pissed off to get a good look at him. He was a nobody with _friends_, and anyway, Nobody was much more impressive with no face at all.

"You know you can't change anything, right?" Roman asked suddenly, rocking his chair back onto its rear legs. "With your mask and your fancy stunts."

Roman was nineteen and bitter with the growing knowledge that he was never getting out of the East End, that if he was lucky he'd probably take over his uncle's bar when the old man retired. He was sharp as a tack, and had big dreams and a big heart, and none of that mattered if you'd taken the fall for a buddy in middle school and had grand larceny on your record.

Jack worried about him.

"It all makes a difference to someone," he answered, as he tied the scarf tightly under his left ear. That was all he'd ever really wanted, anyway.

Roman shrugged. "Not making any _real_ difference, though," he reiterated. "Not at the bottom of things. You're a Band-Aid. You can talk a good line, but you can't bring hope to Crime Alley."

"No," Jack agreed, wriggling into the heavy, deep-red hoodie he'd found in Marcie's thrift store and gotten half off because she thought he was sweet. (He'd also convinced her to adopt a kitten, but that probably shouldn't be considered a form of payment.) "That's something we've all gotta do together."

Roman snorted, but Jack didn't give him time to say whatever negative thing he had in mind. "Besides," he continued, straightening his hood and grinning wide as wide through the muffling layers of scarf, "root causes are _really hard_ to punch in the face."

Roman snorted again, but it was in amusement this time, and when he shook his head he only said, "Nutcase," and made a little toast before knocking back the rest of his drink. J-is-for-Jack stowed his guitar behind the bar, and continued through the kitchen toward the back door.

"Hey, Jack," Roman called out from the front room, made Jack stop with a hand on the doorknob. Roman fiddled with his empty glass. "…take care of yourself."

"You know it," he called back, and then the Red Hood hit the streets.


	10. Red Hood II: Aberdeen

Red Hood II: 'Aberdeen'

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_**A/N: **__Picks up where last chapter left off! We haven't had that since chapter two, wow. Normal universe, Red Hood has been established as an identity with a long history in the Gotham crime world, before the man who would be Joker took it up. Special mention goes to TheSoulsDepths and RollingUpHigh as returning reviewers last chapter. ^^_

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Jack-pro-tempore left the Beacon Street bar through its back door, sporting a look that had been judged intimidating by eight out of ten persons polled, although Alonzo called it the 'casual-Friday mummy impersonating a stop sign' costume. Even _he_ admitted it was appropriately red and hooded, though.

Red Hood was a big responsibility the man called Jack had just sort of stumbled into one night—like most things, really—convenient stumblings and the kindness of strangers, that was his life in a nutshell—it hadn't been a long life so far, so it fit in a very small shell—he'd been wearing his red hoodie when he'd gotten involved in what he'd _thought_ was a mugging, but turned out to be Darcy Leadworth's dealer losing patience.

The Hood was Gotham lore at its finest. _Everybody _said they were Red Hood if they wanted to duck credit for a favor or reckless good deed, out of manners or caution; it was a name you hid behind, and Darcy had been quick to hand it to him before he could be stupid and fail to think of hiding.

But, well, once you fell into a role like that…why stop playing? If the shoe fits…

Edna said that back in the thirties, the Red Hood was a trio who stole bankroll from every major outfit in Gotham at least once, exposed dozens of corrupt police, ran a series of bizarre stings, and got away with it all for nine years straight. One of them was a cop, it turned out in the end, one of them had ties to the Sicilian mob, and the last was never caught.

Alonzo said that in the fifties there'd been two separate Red Hoods—one guy whose focus was avenging crimes against blacks that white juries had allowed to go unpunished and one guy who, according to legend, had known everything that happened anywhere in the city, and made sure news got where it needed to; reporters and police alike had gotten bundles of tip-offs from that Red Hood, and ordinary people tended to get anonymous midnight warnings just when they needed them most. Once or twice, the two had come into conflict.

There'd been a Chinatown Red Hood as recently as the early eighties, but whoever it was seemed to have vanished without a trace, and Lei Bao had told him the best advice he could take from _that_ one was to always have more than one exit from anywhere he slept. Lei was a chef, but Jack was pretty sure she'd been something else before that.

Ted, who was studying history and music theory at Gotham U, said the first recorded appearance of Red Hood in Gotham was shortly after the War of 1812, when veterans were agitating for their back pay, but that the figure had really _established_ itself indelibly (ooh, good word) in the city's folklore during unionization, when the Kanes and Waynes had hired private muscle to go after picketers, and picketers had gone after workers who broke the strike lines, and at least seven people in red masks had been right in the thick of things. Mostly for the best.

They were big shoes, was the point, and well broken-in. Jack wasn't fussed; he'd never owned anything in his life that wasn't second-hand. He could make a legend fit him, or grow to fit it. It had never mattered much anyway, who was under Red Hood's mask.

Masking red didn't do much to keep skin and bone together, but it _worked_. Jack was a naturally happy person—or if he hadn't been before, now that he couldn't remember differently he was a happy person, assuming he'd been a person at _all_ before the day he'd woken up in Gotham Harbor—and the only thing that had been stopping him from being thoroughly contented with his life of surviving and exploring and making friends had been that he couldn't _help._

It had taken a year to save enough to help with one surgery. People needed more than someone to help them put up shelving, and look for things and pets and people they'd lost, and help stretch dinner with another can of beans, and give them a momentary reason to smile. Something more than just another neighbor, and John-Jim-Jamie-Jack couldn't be that more.

Red Hood could.

Could be that was a selfish reason to go into vigilantism, that it made him feel good, but the point was, he was _happy_ now. Roman's point about not being able to punch the root causes of social whoseewhatsis in the face notwithstanding.

The only problem, if you could call it that, was that once you started to take responsibility it was hard to stop. So now he didn't just keep track of gang politics (or real politics, for that matter) because it might come in handy to know, and made good gossip even if it didn't, he kept track because it was his _business_ to know who was likely to do what where, and what the fallout was going to look like. If he didn't, how could he be where he was needed?

He slipped from Burnt Row through the Chopsides and cut through an alley into the narrow, winding streets of Old Town. Gentrification had taken hold in a lot of the area over the last twenty years—a lot of his Crime Alley friends used to live in parts of Old Town that had gone all up-market—but he still knew it pretty well. Old Town wasn't one of the late-night parts of Gotham; except for some of the bars and an all-night laundry or so, most businesses were closed by nine, and the construction crews cleared out by dark.

A lot of construction went along with gentrification; old buildings too far gone to save being torn down and replaced, which people got really emotional about. Jack tried to stay out of it. He didn't see how things were worth more for being old, but a lot of people did; he wasn't normal, not his place to judge.

Besides, _sometimes _he got it just fine. There was a new player on the scene these days. Now, when J—_Jack—_said _new _here, he still meant something that had been around since before he could remember, but this was only the second summer of his whole life, so that wasn't saying much. The Owl's group had busted in out of nowhere like five years ago (from Chicago, from Italy, from Colombia, from Hell; everybody had a theory) and started swallowing up little families and nibbling away at the margins of the others, and it didn't seem like it intended to stop growing. They carried military-grade weaponry, treated disobedience like treason, and didn't give back a damn thing to the community.

'The boss is crazy,' was the word on the street. Some rumors said he thought he was an actual owl, and ate small animals whole. Other people said he ate _human hearts. _During meetings. You could see the bloodstains on his gloves, they said.

Jack had learned by now not to believe everything he heard, but the note of fear people got when they talked about the Owls, that stuck with him. Everyone who grew up in Gotham knew about the Court of Owls; even _he _knew the rhyme and he couldn't remember ever being a child anywhere, but that was a bogey-story, an urban legend. It wasn't _real. _(Probably. Edna thought it was, and Edna had lived in Gotham for eighty-seven years and ought to be paid attention to, but a pretty massive chunk of 'everybody' knew there was no such thing as the Court of Owls—which was what the Court of Owls would _want _you to think, said Edna. Point.) Except here was this gang, using the myth, well-funded and ruthless and peeling away the loyalists from other groups like the layers of muscle in a well-cooked fish.

Now, on the whole Jack wasn't in favor of organized crime. They did some good, especially for people like him who fell into the cracks, but they also did some things he really couldn't forgive, and they got downright mean when people didn't give them what they wanted.

Still, he did like them better the smaller they were; little territories meant every street corner was precious, and the local don (or whatever) would usually do important things for a neighborhood that you could wait a million years for the city government to get around to, and still be disappointed. Ted said feudal reciprocity was a valid form of social contract. Maria said the smart crime bosses knew not to piss where they ate.

The Irish crowd in the Cauldron was pretty good that way, especially compared to the Falcones, who'd (according to the gossip tree) been slowly crushing the other Italian families for the last fifteen years or so and getting further and further from traditional obligations, or Dimitrov's Russian-and-sundry-other-Slav organization, which had been firmly rooted in Gotham for over two decades, and still didn't really mingle, partly because there wasn't much in the way of Russian neighborhoods anymore.

Cobblepot's group was his favorite, possibly because the Penguins were kind of crazy and all wore spats and carried umbrellas or canes, and didn't deal hard drugs, but mostly because Oswald Cobblepot took his sense of honor really, really seriously, and it had a lot more to do with keeping his word and not dragging outsiders into his problems than with avenging insults.

His _least_ favorite was the Owl's. They were so…_businesslike_. They were selfish and oppressive, and they weren't even having fun. And every single member of the outfit he'd encountered had either had no imagination at all or…been scared all the time, he guessed was what you'd call it. Not twitching-at-noises scared, or not usually, at least not until after he'd pulled the poltergeist routine for a bit that one time, but just walking around under a constant pall of fear that they'd screw up, and _then.._.something bad. Heart made a snack of at next morning's meeting, possibly.

Jack-for-now felt quite strongly that if his city was going to be conquered, it should be by someone _preferable_ to Bruce Wayne, not somebody even worse.

He reached the address he'd been given and squinted up into the looming frame of a half-finished office complex, all steely bones and new flooring. One of Wayne's projects. Jack liked buildings under construction; they were life and activity and bright yellow hardhats, and he felt a sort of kinship with them. He was a human-under-construction, in a way. Of course, _generally_ the buildings had blueprints and things all set up before they began, but did the buildings know that? Or did they wait eagerly to see what they were going to be?

No sign of a light, but—there! Eleventh floor, as arranged. Distinct motion. Only one, unless the others were standing well back. He'd gotten here early…but the other guy was _even earlier. _Gotta get up early in the morning to get the jump on this guy, was the saying, except nocturnal, so the early bird got up…what? Around sunset? Jack grinned to himself.

Time to crash a party.

He stole up the stairs to the eleventh floor as quietly as he could. Stopped on the last flight with his eyes just above the level of the floor, getting the lay of the land and taking in the lone looming figure gazing out at the Gotham skyline.

At first glance, you might have really thought it was a giant owl nesting in the structure, all bronzy flash of cruel hooked beak and huge flat eyes and jagged feathers, but there was a human underneath. Here was a guy with a bit of flair for presentation, Jack-of-the-moment thought, as he crept a little higher. Too bad he was a titanic jerk.

(Psychotic, too, but Jack had been informed by numerous people he counted friends that so was he, so he couldn't point fingers there.)

He couldn't make out any bloodstains on the gloves, but they were mostly black, so it might not show.

"Do ya really eat live mice?"

He didn't choose that as an opener just to be a good distraction; he seriously wanted to know. He stepped onto the eleventh floor.

The Owl's head snapped around—_not_ completely independently of his shoulders, so there went the human/bird hybrid idea; he owed Kate five bucks. The cape flared with the motion, and its edges really were worked like feathers…if he pounced on you, you'd go down feeling just like a little mouse.

Jack was prepared for that. It was kind of the whole reason he was here. Some of Cobblepot's guys had turned under the pressure of owlish expansion, and as proof of their loyalty they'd been asked to double cross their former boss and bring him before the Owl, to either submit or die.

The foundation in the construction site, next lot over, was still wet, and Jack knew Ozzie and his sense of honor. He knew how this was going to play out, between one bird and another.

Cobblepot's _loyal_ guys had managed to find out the meeting place and were planning to stage what they knew was a suicidal rescue, and Red Hood had dropped in early this morning to offer his assistance. He'd distract the Owl, they'd move in and extract their boss. Owl minions were already notorious for their reluctance to take any action without orders. Even if they had prior orders to shoot down anyone who interfered, which was likely, they'd still be less effective without his direct supervision.

(The Penguins were probably going to kill any of the traitors they could, and Jack didn't like that, but he liked it marginally better than the other way around, and…he was tired of letting this guy do whatever he wanted.)

"Huh?" he prompted. "Come on, I got money riding on this."

The Owl said nothing. He had a strong, blunt jaw—a bruiser's chin—but his mouth was thin and humorless—a judge's mouth. Even without his reputation, Jack didn't think he'd like him much.

"Look, if you don't want people saying things like that, don't dress like a bird. Themes are nice and all, but you've gotta elaborate enough people know what direction to take it." Nothing. "You don't wanna hear the owl pellet theories." Wow, _nothing. _Silent glaring from behind goggles was surprisingly effective. "Look, whatcha want in Gotham anyway?"

Finally, he said something—deep, scornful voice, not a hoot or a screech; hell, he made _Jack_ feel screechy.

"I am the King of Owls. This city belongs to me."

"Really?" Jack rubbed at the bridge of his nose through crimson fabric, squinting thoughtfully at the man he'd heard so much about. He was fairly impressive in person. Broad shoulders, brawny chest to match the voice, hands that could wrap around the average neck and crush any chance of breathing, never mind a skinny one like Jack's. "Cuz I have to point out, most of the people who live here…they ain't owls. Kinda outside your jurisdiction, right?"

"Gotham is the City of Owls." His attention, and presumably his hidden eyes, flicked over Jack's mask and hood, and he must have heard there was a new Red Hood because there was something like recognition there. "You are merely the scum in its gutters."

Jack pulled a face no one could actually see. "Owch. That gets me, you know? Right here." He tapped himself over the heart. It was pounding, and he wondered if this was what fear felt like. He didn't think so. He was angry, and he was excited, and he was brimming with hilarity, but nothing in him was sorry for getting himself into this.

He hated bullies.

Already Jack could say with some certainty that this Owl character wasn't Mafia. Even a batshit crazy Mafioso had some sense of connection to the man on the street, no matter how high he climbed. No, _this_ guy really meant it literally when he called himself a king of a mythical conspiracy.

…it seemed kind of like a waste of insanity. He should go into painting, or something.

Giant-Owl-Man loomed. "Are you trying to be funny?"

"I _am_ being funny. Not my fault if you don't have a sense of humor. It's okay, though, I knew that going in, cuz you're meeting Mob guys in half a building dressed up as a bird and you're not smiling. Did your parents have it surgically removed when you were a kid?"

King Bird had already been bristling, but at the last bit he managed to draw himself up another inch. The feathers at his neck spiked just like on a real bird. What was that _made _of? "Watch your tongue," he bit out.

"Is it the surgery thing or the parents thing? I promise, I won't make any your-mom jokes; I'm above that. You can, though; I never knew my mother, so I won't take it personally—"

He had to stop talking for a second to lean sharply backward out of the way of a hand grasping for his throat. Looked like the Owl had noticed the same thing he had about their relative sizes. _Ooor _maybe he was just the strangling type. "That's just harsh," he tutted, as he took a step or so back to get his feet under his head again, and straightened up. "I guess it's not really good form to mock people's disabilities, though," he acknowledged. "Sorry about that."

The big man closed the new distance with a single heavy step and then swung an equally heavy fist at J's face, one he wove away from just enough that it passed over his shoulder. "Whoops, eheh."

The next blow was faster, lower, and he caught it with both hands an inch from his gut. Ducked backward out of the way of the other fist. "Oh, come on, you're not even trying," he clucked. Did the Owl think he'd slugged his way through every slum in Gotham with a 90%+ victory rate on a base of _incompetence?_

The next punch was a jab like lightning that he saw coming for his face but couldn't completely dodge. He smirked in defiance of an aching cheekbone. "That all ya got?"

The King In Feathers was silent a second, as though he thought he could stare J's secrets out through his muffled face. "Is there some reason you want me to kill you?" he asked at last, and right then, giving in to curiosity, for the first time he was human. Jack could almost see the actual person showing through under the mask.

But even if he didn't eat human hearts, the person underneath was still a coldblooded murderer who, if he'd ever had a reason Jack could have understood, must have forgotten it a long time ago. Because all he'd ever done as the Owl showed only an all-consuming need to bring everything under his control, and rule over it. And Red Hood's goal tonight was to get his undivided attention.

"I'm not afraid of you," he spelled out, carefully, as if he thought the other man was a little slow.

The Owl lashed out, rode through his block, laid him out flat on his back at the edge of the floor, with the city stretching out behind him, through the gap where a wall did not yet exist. "_You should be._"

Jack-tonight looked up, daubing a trickle of blood from his lip with the bit of scarf wrapped over it, grinning, and shrugged. "Hehe. Probably," he admitted. "But I've always been a bit…screwloose." With that, he rolled backward, out over the long drop to the pavement, infinitely rewarded by an instant of shock on his enemy's masked face.

For a moment he twisted through empty air, and then just as his toes pointed to the ground he seized the exposed girder with both hands, put a little extra spin into his fall, _swung_, and dropped neatly onto the floor below, through its identical lack of outer wall.

From overhead he heard a wordless growl of frustration, and he whooped aloud as he scrambled for the nearest stairs, knowing the shadow of death would be following him.

_Hunt me, birdie,_ he thought, grinning under his scarf as he pounded down metal steps, incautious of noise. _Keep those big cold eyes on me and don't look at anybody else. Look at me!_

_I can take it._

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_**A/N: **__First encounter! Much history yay. Very different heroing approach this universe. ^^ Did you know that Aberdeen has been inhabited by humans for 8,000 years? Before that it was a nest of dragons. One of these statements is a lie. Happy Mother's Day! Sorry this chapter is wholly inappropriate to the festivities.  
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	11. Freebird IV: Nightingale

Freebird III: 'Nightingale (In A Golden Cage?)'

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"Fuck," Jason pronounced, slamming a folded newspaper down on the kitchen table.

"Language," Harley reproved, absently. She was reading a medical journal on her laptop and mashing potatoes at the same time, with predictably lumpy results.

J never bothered twitting the kid about his foul mouth. He'd never heard either Talon swear, so cursing was probably something from before he'd been taken, which meant he approved of it asserting itself, and anyway, life was too short to go around restricting what other people could say. Harl liked feeling maternal, though, and probably worried about Ella picking up some of those words.

He knew this was serious when Jason didn't roll his eyes or even seem to hear Harley, so he turned his back on the sautéing mushrooms and fajitas to give the teenager in the leather jacket his full attention.

"He's got a new one," Jason announced, and handed Jokester the paper. Front page of the society section—after last week's tragic, mysterious death of Mr. and Mrs. Drake of Bristol, Gotham's own Bruce Wayne had stepped forward to take custody of their orphaned son. There was a whole load of twaddle, of course, but the important part was the picture, which Jason stabbed out with one gloved forefinger. "See?"

Jokester saw. There was Wayne, in his usual perfect suit, with his perfect razor-thin smile and a hand on the shoulder of a small dark-haired boy, whose face was perfectly expressionless. "Could he maybe just want control of the Drake company?" he asked hopefully, though not with a great deal of actual hope. It was still strange, after all these years of hating and guessing, to have had Jason confirm with perfect confidence that Owlman was in fact Bruce Wayne. He'd suspected, of course, more and more, but _knowing _was something different.

Jaybird shot him a scornful look. "It's a Gotham company." Which meant he already had all the control he needed, and certainly didn't need to disrupt his home life with a child just to gain more. Jason tapped the photo again.

Timothy Drake (10) had blue eyes, high cheekbones, and a dancer's build. "Word on the street is already everyone laying odds whether the kid's a carbon copy getting groomed to take over the empire, or royally fucked in the literal sense," Jason reported disgustedly. "Cobblepot's guys think the kid conspired with Wayne to off his own 'rents. _Something's _sure different this time, kid in the _papers_. All I know is he's the Owl's _type_." He combed a hand feverishly through his own messy black hair. "No way that's coincidence."

Harley had lost interest in both journal and potatoes some time ago, and now she stood sharply. "Jason," she said, nakedly concerned.

"Not like that." Jason flapped an irritated hand. "Hell knows if he wanted that he could have taken it any time, I've _told_ you." Therapy for a teenager as heavily traumatized and as defensive as Jason was heavy going, and Jokester knew his wife worried her young patient was using denial to cope. "The kid looks like a Talon. _Fuck._" He kicked the base of the stove, making the pans rattle.

J was nearer than Harley, so he put a hand on Jason's shoulder. "It's okay, Jay lad."

"I want to hate him," Jason bit out, eyes fixed on the floor. "I want to believe he's this soulless, preppy little demon who signed up for this shit and poisoned his own family. Goddamn rich-ass bastard." He let Jokester pull him into a hug, forehead pressing into the side of a paste-white neck. Didn't return the gesture, but then he never did, never reached out; J was okay with that. He could get hugs from lots of people if he needed them, so he could afford to give as many as he wanted away. "Goddammit."

"It's not your fault, Jason," said Harley, coming around the table. "No matter what this boy's situation is, you are _not_ responsible. Not even a little bit."

"I _know _that_,_" Jason growled. Shoved his way free of Jokester and snatched the paper back. "Wayne does what he wants. We have to help him," he added. Brandishing the photo again. "If he needs it."

J nodded sharply. Harley was right, of course—nothing Owlman did was Jason's fault. But if Bruce Wayne _had_ murdered his neighbors and appropriated their son because he felt the need to replace his escaped bird, they (as the putative thieves) were a _little_ bit responsible. "'course. Piece of cake."

"Dinner is burning, puddin'," Harley informed him.

He saved the fajitas, but saving Timothy Drake wasn't that easy. Getting close to the recently orphaned ward of _the _Bruce Wayne was hard enough for paparazzi, never mind a band of wanted lunatics, especially since they had to be able to retreat immediately if the boy _wasn't _a victim, or even if he was and was too cowed to do anything but blow the whistle on them. They came back to the project repeatedly. "Can't we just wait until he comes to us?" Waylon complained, some eight weeks in. He was the most conspicuous of all of them, even more than J, and he was sick of all the time and effort they kept pouring into plans he couldn't be part of, for the sake of one kid who might be a monster.

"Not a good idea, Croc," said Ed, after a moment of uncomfortable silence.

"Why? We don't even know if he's _going_ to be Talon, but if he is he'll be out here, without all the bodyguards and stuff keeping us back."

Jason made a disgusted sound deep in his throat. "And by then he'll be properly trained. The idea is saving him, Scales." There was a heavy, strangled silence that lasted a few seconds, and then the young Hood pushed away from the scarred table and its annotated Gotham Academy floorplans. "Believe me," the boy who had been Talon said bitterly, crossing the few steps to drop a stack of dinner dishes into the sink, and flicking the tap on so water gushed over grease and carried crumbs away. "He's not sending the new kid into the field until he's already bloody to the wrist."

As if Jason had the gift of prophecy, people started dying around Tim Drake. One of his new teachers, first. Dreadful accident, of course, a fall down the stairs. A few weeks later a Gotham Academy bully who'd been harassing the new student killed himself under suspicious circumstances. Then, in the first days of the summer break, the boy Drake had apparently been closest to at his old boarding school passed away. Food poisoning.

"You really think he killed his best friend?" Jokester asked, the ripe plum in his mouth tasting like dry wood. Sometimes it was hard even for him to find the joke.

"If he already killed his parents, why not?" Pam shrugged, sprawled over her chair, a wide comfortable thing she had grown out of living vines. Her fortified base in Robinson Park was the safest place in Gotham, but a lot of people found the animated plants viscerally terrifying, which was a shame. "Seems like something a group like the Court of Owls would use as initiation."

Jason hadn't had anyone who mattered to him in the first place, with his mother dead, and no one knew who the first Talon had been, or whether he was still alive, so who could say. "It could just as easily be the Owl taking away everyone he can turn to." That was the _good_ option. How was that the good option?

"True," Pamela allowed. Her big green eyes narrowed on him for a moment. "You're taking this very personally. It seems like half the time I talk to you lately, you're working on this Drake problem."

"Speaking of which, apparently the duck population is spiking…"

"J."

He sighed. Busted. Sucked the last of the pulp off his plumstone and threw it overhand into the underbrush, where it blossomed into a healthy shrub-sized plum tree as he watched. "Jason feels responsible, but he was a kid in a trap. I'm the one who didn't even think about the Owl going for a replacement until it was too late."

"Could you have done anything different if you _had_ thought ahead?"

"Dunno."

Pam rolled her eyes. "I'm telling Harley you're being a moron about this," she threatened. "And yes," she added, settling back a little as she let the subject drop, "the duck population in Gotham River is improving nicely, because the pollutant reduction initiative everyone helped me with last year has already substantially improved the growth of edible waterweeds and cresses. The molluscs are doing nicely, too."

"That's great, Pam!" J leapt up and went in for a hug. Pam made a grumbling noise, but she hugged him back.

Someday, he thought, taking comfort in the patient pressure of her arms and the smell of earth and new plum blossom, Pam would leave Gotham. Back to respectable botany, or letting the League of Shadows recruit her to help regrow rainforest like they wanted, or whatever thing that was really _hers _she settled on. She was happy enough here, but this wasn't her fight, not really.

It was okay. People left. That didn't always mean you lost them.

"You really do get low just like anyone sometimes, don't you?" Pam murmured.

"'Course I do," J muttered back, a little sulky that she didn't believe this was just a congratulatory hug about molluscs, but not really. "I'm human, aren't I?" He started to let go, hugging accomplished, but Pam didn't let him.

"You're doing fine," she told him, with the kind of confidential whisper people used when they didn't know how to say things like this to other people's faces. "We save people. Didn't you all teach me not to let regret rule my life? What's done is done. Jason is getting better. All you can do for Timothy Drake is give him a chance."

She loosened the hug, then, gripped him by the biceps and held him at arm's length so she could punctuate the pep talk with raised eyebrows. "You hear me?"

"I think I got plum juice in your hair," Jokester confessed, splaying sticky hands, and Pam wrinkled her nose.

"Okay, _that_ you can regret till you die."

(As it turned out, though, the Drake case was something J was going to regret for a very long time.)

* * *

**_A/N: _**_Decided__** '**__League of Shadows' was a perfectly acceptable name for heroic ecology ninjas. They have a lemur mascot, because lemurs are the fluffy ninjas of the endangered species list. So, you think Mirror!Tim is an ambitious little monster, or just another of Bruce Wayne's victims? _


	12. Quinzel I: Doctor

Quinzel I: 'Doctor'

_**A/N:**__ This puts us about three years after 'Glasgow,' and about ten before 'Freebird.' No serious aspersions are here intended against the profession of psychiatry._

* * *

Arkham was better than death.

Jokester knew this. He also knew that Owlman hated him, and was _more_ than willing to kill people, and definitely had no sentimental reasons for keeping J alive, which meant that if he was here instead of the grave, his enemy believed it to be a fate worse than death.

Jokester tried not to let Owlman's opinions have much influence. Anything else led to the bad kind of madness.

Arkham was _better_ than death, if only because from Arkham you could escape. Where there was life, there was hope. He was a great believer in hope, so he quite frequently reminded himself that his present situation could be much worse. He knew it was true. Just as he knew his therapist was not really his friend.

She was the fifth doctor they'd assigned him, and he knew she was going to be better than the last one when she said, "Do you prefer to be called Mister Jokester?"

He snorted out a snigger. "No. That sounds stupid. I just told the last guy that because any extra seconds he spent saying my name were seconds he wasn't saying anything else."

Doctor Laupon had a lot of theories about the criminal mind, especially the criminal psychotic, and he was determined to get his criminal psychotics to fall in line with them. Saying anything he didn't already expect to hear was asking for trouble, so most sessions with him were spent listening to him explain you. Apparently J was a compulsive liar, because of some really dreadful things he couldn't one hundred percent swear had never happened to him, unfortunately.

J had liked Doctor Thompkins' hypotheses about his childhood much better. But _she_ wasn't a psychiatrist, so her opinion was not, he had been informed, relevant.

He looked sidelong at the little blonde woman in the big comfy chair beside her desk; he'd sprawled all over her couch at the first opportunity, and it gave him a lot more options on what angle to look at her from. Upside-down often upset people. She hadn't told him to sit up yet. "I kinda like the 'Mister,' though," he told her, offhand. Not overfamiliar, made him sound like a real person; right now, it was all win.

She nodded, lips pursed thoughtfully. Her lipstick was perfect, like her hair and her neatly pressed blouse and skirt, and he wondered if that was because a pretty woman needed to project absolute control to be taken seriously, or for some internal reason. But they weren't here to talk about her. "How do you feel about 'Mister J?'"

That was the way anonymous patients were classically referred to in psych books, he knew, just a letter, but that was also the kind of 'how do you feel' he could really get behind.

His grin felt more real than it had in a long while. "Mister J will do," he pronounced. "Doctor Q."

And she _was_ better than the other four. He didn't feel the need to provoke her every second, and she didn't seem compelled to have him sedated every time he laughed. Really, he _knew _they had funny ideas about how dangerous he was, but did they really expect him to talk about his feelings _without_ laughing?

She wasn't his friend. Everything she did for him was to soften him up and get inside his head. He knew that. Visions of papers danced in her eyes with every small revelation—maybe, if she could get enough out of him, a _book_. Jokester was notorious, after all, and hugely controversial. He could _make her career._

Sometimes he would swear she was plotting out chapters even as he talked. Even if she never made a major 'breakthrough' in his case, never changed him significantly (which she wouldn't), she could probably get pretty good sales just repackaging his philosophy as a tell-all, and hey, why would he say no to that? Most of his best-known escapades were basically just co-opting some form of stage to perform on. So long as he didn't get carried away and embarrass himself somehow, Quinzel's book would be a stage all its own. (Maybe his last one—no, he _was_ getting out of here, and hey, that would definitely help her sales, if he was out on the streets again when it was published.)

J's lack of childhood memories seemed to offend her less than it had the others, and she didn't mind when he got evasive, and even when he could tell she knew he was lying, she never did anything that could be interpreted as punishment.

He hooked his knees over the back of the sofa, and borrowed the books off her shelves without asking, and asked intrusive questions about her personal life, some of which she even answered. (From a combination of what she said and what she didn't he established that she had a rather strained relationship with her parents.) Quinzel was patient, and responsive, and to all appearances actually interested in what he had to say. She wasn't his first ambitious doctor, but she was the smartest.

Doctor Quinzel was in fact entirely too clever, and he gave away more than he meant to sometimes, because she _listened._ Jokester wasn't made to be alone, couldn't _stand _it, needed to be around people, at least an _audience_ to play to if not his friends, but he spent more than half his Arkham time in solitary, due to an official advisory that he might be 'a danger to the other patients.' (Which, considering one of the guys on his ward had killed seventeen people and eaten their livers, was complete bullcrap and clearly Wayne's doing. Stupid Wayne and his stupid wealth.)

So when he was in Quinzel's office and she was actually _talking to him, like he actually existed_, all bright eyes and engaged smiles, he kind of had a lot to say. If he hadn't, he'd probably have been conversing with his feet pretty soon. He told her so. She didn't up his antipsychotics. Trust increased.

"You wouldn't be put in separation so often if you would take your medication," said Doctor Q one day.

And because she listened, he sat up and looked at her, and said (still smiling because he didn't trust her nearly enough to stop): "Those pills make me want to die."

He was very good, possibly the best in the asylum, at not taking his medication, but the days when he couldn't pull it off, or they figured out that he had, were the hardest to get through. This was his fourth month in Arkham. He had come up with forty-seven escape plans and thirty-one methods of suicide. Most of the former had been thwarted, or deemed not worth either the inherent risks or the inevitable collateral damage, yet.

He hadn't attempted to enact any of the latter. Yet.

Doctor Quinzel tapped her pen against her nice leather-bound notebook, lips pursed. She didn't think he was joking, and she knew he wasn't lying. "Depression can be a side effect. I'll see what I can do."

His prescription changed, and life in the loony pen grew a little less awful, though he still took the pills only as often as he couldn't get out of it. (Sleight of hand was the world's most useful skill. It was too bad none of the staff carried keys into the ward, or he'd be long gone.)

Of course, to get away with not taking his meds he had to spend most of his time faking being _on_ his meds, which was both difficult and frustrating. As he'd told all his doctors at some point, the drugs they gave him to strangle down whatever type of crazy they'd decided he was this week weren't really all that picky about which parts of him to strangle. Brains were complicated. Whole sections of personality seemed to get carved away.

His sense of humor had once deserted him entirely for three hours straight, and it had been the first time in his life he could remember ever feeling really frightened. He didn't tell his doctor the last part.

There were a lot of things he didn't tell Doctor Quinzel, and never would. J was a pretty open guy, but even if the Owl wasn't keeping an eye on him now, he'd _definitely_ go through all his records after he broke out. So he was vague a lot. He showed no weaknesses, betrayed no details about the people he cared for most. Having someone to talk to was nice, but you were obviously going to hit a wall in therapy if you couldn't tell your doctor anything you wouldn't want your worst enemy to hear.

Not that he minded. He was happy to keep his head screwed on as crooked as ever—he _liked_ his crazy. He _was _his crazy. He had no intention of being cured, and was not here to become sane.

At first, when Doctor Quinzel laughed at his jokes, it was a dainty thing, like silver bells, but as she got to know him better, and he learned just what she found funniest, her laughter went on longer and longer, until the silver bells were joined by big brass ones that clanged with joyful abandon, and then she was beautiful.

By the time he admitted she wasn't his enemy, he was more than half in love.

* * *

_**A/N: **__The canon pre-Flashpoint Earth-3 that gave us Jokester arbitrarily grabbed Harley from her life and made her Jackie-the-comedian's manager. And fridged her after two panels. I'm like, no, what? If you're this hung up on the Jokester/Three Face 'ship, just leave Harley out of it. Gah.  
_


	13. Quinzel II: Harlene

Quinzel II: Harlene

* * *

"_A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and _men_, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it."_ –Thoreau, _Civil Disobedience _

* * *

The fateful day started fairly ordinary, for a day in Arkham; maybe a little on the stressful end. Halfway through his three-o'clock session they had gone nowhere except in tiny circles, and back over some sociopolitical material they'd talked to death already. Doc Q sat beside her desk in the green wing-backed chair and sighed at his obstinacy. "I thought we were really starting to get somewhere, Mister J," she said sadly.

He tutted through his teeth.

"We don't have to talk about your scars today if you don't want to."

"Well, of course we don't!" he exclaimed, his cheer just short of manic. She couldn't _make_ him talk. It was the only thing he really had left, that decision of what to say or not say, besides the daily struggle to get out of taking his medications. It was…annoying that he couldn't resent that as strongly as he used to, because he was getting attached, but that didn't mean he had to let her blatantly manipulate him.

Doctor Quinzel set her notebook aside and folded her hands in her lap. "You don't have to tell me anything difficult, even if we do. But, Mister J, do you think you could just tell me, simply…how you got them?"

He stared at her. "How I got these scars?" A long white forefinger ran along the puckered flesh of his right cheek.

"We have seven different explanations in your file."

J nearly choked on the injustice of it. Flung his hands up to heaven, and erupted onto his feet so they could go up further, and then flung them out to the sides in aggrieved innocence. "Because no one ever believes me when I tell the truth!"

"Owlman?" she asked. He strained to hear condescension, but couldn't find any. He'd been told often enough that his obsession was ridiculous, that he didn't need to make things up to seem more interesting, even that Owlman didn't exist and blaming things on him was just a shielding behavior, even though J had _made sure_ the man was seen in his stupid bird suit several times before he was thrown in here, by witnesses the doctors ought to believe.

"Yes," he said, hesitant. Watching her. "He cut my face and dumped me in a vat of acid, because I kept standing up to him. I didn't die, but now I don't fit in anywhere except in people's nightmares."

Bleak, but he was in a bleak mood.

"I believe you," she told him gently. "And you _don't_ look like a nightmare, J."

Doctor Q smiled and cocked her head, and he felt something inside his ribs give a swoop and a flutter, and he dropped back into his seat simply because he could no longer trust his knees.

"You know," she confided, "if it would help you feel more comfortable, it's perfectly okay for you to call me Harlene."

"Harlene," he repeated. His heart did a funny little skip, and did it again when he looked into her warm eyes.

Oh.

_Oh._

He was in _so_ much trouble.

* * *

Next session was on a Monday, and she started him off with the usual routine; how are you feeling, any particular concerns, yes I had a lovely weekend. J didn't volunteer much but he didn't take the bit in his teeth, either, and Doctor…Harlene seemed to see this as promising.

"Why are you here?" she asked. Every week like clockwork, she asked it. The others had, too, less often but enough that he was pretty sure it was part of the basic Arkham playbook. At first he'd tried to be funny about it—"Great vacation spot," he'd said, and "I just can't get enough of that green Jell-O in the cafeteria," and then he'd been angry for a while; "Somebody paid somebody off," or "because you want to pretend you have a real job," or, once, "_Straitjacket._"

With Harlene he'd moved back toward funny, though a bit more honest than before, but today he said, "Because either the Owl or Wayne actually _reads_."

She could tell the difference between this apparently nonsensical answer and the kind that really didn't mean much of anything, and frowned. "How is that connected?" she asked.

Doctor Q hated it when he talked about Bruce Wayne and his ties to Owlman. Wayne was, after all, the man primarily responsible for her pay checks, and now that Jokester had forced the Owl far enough into the light that several authorities had had to admit his existence, he was known to be deep into organized crime. It wasn't that it was surprising for powerful men to be involved in shady dealings, and Wayne was well known to be ice-cold, but still. Allegations like that could get her into trouble if she seemed to believe them too much, even _knowing_ he probably wasn't wrong.

Luckily he didn't have to push the Wayne connection too much to make this point. "Remember back in April, when I spent a couple of weeks pouring all those jellybeans over people and doing consciousness-raising demonstrations with a bullhorn?"

It was 'remember' rather than 'did you hear about,' because the jellybean thing especially had been very satisfactorily covered by the media. It was too funny a story to ignore, and several thousand rainbow candies all over someone's office or factory floor or commuter route, or gushing out the back of a truck, was not important or disruptive enough for any of the Powers of Gotham to be able to justify suppressing it. Harlene would have heard about it, if not at the time, then when she took over his case. She nodded, encouraging.

He smiled. "Literary reference. 'Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman.' Harlan Ellison. I _love_ that story. If I'd read it before 'Jokester' caught on I might be 'Harlequin' right now, even if it doesn't start with a J.

"I teased Owlman about it when he came after me then—the Ticktockman is a _government official_ in a mask, not a crimelord, but he's all about order, and so is the Owl, in his way. This is _his_ city, he says. I disrupt it. But the Harlequin in the story—he's a lot like me."

J flashed his best grin at her—not the charming thing it'd been before his face had been cut and colorless, but people still registered it as a smile, not a threat. He only sometimes made babies cry. "Hero of the masses," he continued, in a tone of false modesty. "And," he added more quietly, "he's _all_ about freedom."

Harlene leaned forward a little to show her continued interest, but didn't interrupt. She'd made a few notes, but she was good about not being ostentatious about it.

"His world is a lot worse than this one," Jokester added quietly, eyes focusing for a moment far away, on a distant fiction of a tan-faced man with auburn hair, in a suit of colors and bells, laughing in a future world with so, so little joy and no freedom at all, where a man in a mask with no heart of his own could-and-would turn your heart off, when you had been tardy too many times, or simply lived long enough to wear out your use. Laughing, and giving everything he had to try to break everyone's chains, even though the chains were all inside their heads.

"And I won't let anything like it happen," he added, clasping his hands together, and glancing at his doctor again, she who was supposed to tease and twist and push and soothe him into something that could live in the system, not disrupting it, not demanding it change for the better.

_Pretty Alice,_ he thought, thinking of the story world again and the woman who'd given Harlequin away, when he'd thought she still loved him, but Doctor Q had never lied, and they weren't any sort of couple, and if she betrayed him—well, he would have no real right to be surprised.

His mouth twisted, and he looked at his hands again instead, his bone-white hands. "The thing is, you see," he said to those hands, "they caught him, in the story. Harlequin. He had a real name and a real heart, and they could have killed him easily, but they sent him away to Coventry and worked him over till he gave in, and he wasn't anymore, wasn't Harlequin, wasn't anyone, and he went on TV and told them all he'd been wrong." He chafed his hands together. They were cold, even though the office wasn't. "That's why I'm here," he said, almost under his breath. "One of them _reads_."

Harlene's hand closed over his, delicate and very warm. "Mister J," she told him, very seriously, leaning close with her big blue eyes so warm and sincere, "I _promise_ that is not what I'm trying to do to you."

He closed his. "I know," he said. Her hand was so _warm_. He wanted to clasp it between both of his, but that would give away too much.

"I want to help you."

"I know."

She squeezed at his fingers, bracing and confidential. "Thank you for trusting me."

J laughed aloud at the irony. He spent the rest of the session laughing, and Harlene couldn't get him to explain why, but she didn't stop holding his hand.

* * *

"Hey, Clownface."

The voice of one of his fellow inmates broke into J's musings. This was the first time since his arrival he'd been allowed into the rec room and _not_ spent the entire time socializing with anyone willing to give him the time of day, which showed just how wrapped up in his thoughts he was, and the hand that had been repeatedly tracing the distended line of his own mouth came to a halt as the other man loomed over the back of his couch. "Cut it out. You're creeping everyone out." Since 'everyone' on this occasion included the man who'd eaten seventeen human livers, J suspected he should be proud, though the possibility that the looming patient was exaggerating certainly existed.

His name was Niles Hathwich, and he claimed he could breathe underwater because he was half Atlantean. This would not have presented a problem had it actually been true, but he was in every physical respect a perfectly normal surface human.

Niles had a long history of stealing other people's boats in his quest to 'get home,' and once he was out of sight of the shore either scuttling the craft or leaping over the side. His remarkable record of miraculous survival, shameless grand larceny, and blatant break with reality had eventually landed him here, where he was known as 'Fins' and had a knack for getting contraband in through some kind of favor-trading network that encompassed a number of staff.

Although he had been hostile to attempts to leverage his network to escape, J rather liked him.

"Seriously, Clownface, cut it out. Your mouth hasn't gotten any less fucked up since you got here."

J popped up to sit on the couch instead of sprawl, fingers still pressed against his lips, gave Fins an open, bewildered look, with comically wide eyes, and blew a long, questioning raspberry.

The big man snorted. "'course, your mouth could always get _worse_, I rearrange it for you," he grumbled. Fins had spent quite a few years in and out of prison before being remanded to Arkham Asylum, and carried a lot of coping behaviors over. He didn't actually start many fights, although rumor about the time in group therapy that a serial arsonist turned out to actually _be_ the pyrokinetic meta he'd said he was, and Fins took him on hand to hand before he could set the place on fire and kill them all, meant that his threats were taken fairly seriously.

Jokester was just contemplating the costs and benefits of picking a fight with him himself when Fins sloped off, and J dropped back onto the sofa, giggling a little at his own latest form of crazy.

He'd never been one for controlling his thoughts—usually would balk at the very idea—but now he wished he had at least a little mastery of the technique. Because his traitorous mind wouldn't leave well enough alone, and being punched in the face actually sounded like a great distraction. His bruises always turned so many pretty colors.

He'd read psychology books. He knew people thought they were in love with their therapists _all the time_, just because when you had a person who put that much effort into you and seemed to care about you that much, and you gave them all those pieces of yourself, it was easy to want them to be all yours and never leave you. No competent psychiatrist would take it seriously, and no one like Harlene Quinzel would take _him_ seriously even if he wasn't her patient. Crazy, nameless, penniless, hideous—_stop that,_ he told himself. Normally he liked himself just fine, but normally he wasn't evaluating his romantic prospects.

It wasn't _fair_ that his only good doctor and the nicest person in Arkham was also so…_sweet,_ and _pretty_, and…_augh._

He rolled over and buried his face in the couch cushions. The worst anyone here could do if he left his guard down was try to eat him.

Decisions had to be made.

* * *

Two days later, Harlene sat patiently while he ransacked her office. He found one fairly cheap audio bug on the bottom of a potted plant and a more sophisticated one between the pages of _Jungian Archetypes and Identity_, and destroyed them both. He kept looking for a while, but finally decided that had been everything. Then he sat down on her desk, leaned forward over steepled fingers, and said to his psychologist, not smiling, "Can you promise me something?"

Patience had turned into a sort of affronted shock. "Were those _recording devices?_"

"Yes."

"In _my office?_"

"I think the one under the aster was the asylum director. He's paranoid about being ousted if his control of the staff slips. The one in the book was probably from Owlman. I guess he's interested in my progress after all." He favored her with a grin. "They watch you at your hearth / they watch you in your bed / the Court of Owls is not / just a thing inside my head. I'm crazy, Doctor Q, not delusional."

"I told you," she said, oddly steady, "you can call me Harlene."

"Okay. Harlene." He leaned forward. "Can you promise me? That if I'm frank, you won't make any notes that Owlman could get his hands on?"

"I..." She wanted to tell him that would never happen, that it was just his paranoia talking, he could see that, but her eyes flickered to the fragmented little machines in the middle of her desk, and narrowed in anger.

Harlene Quinzel took her job seriously. He'd realized that. Yes, she was chasing glory, but she still held that there was a sacred trust in psychiatry, that it was a branch of medicine and the Hippocratic Oath held, and her calling didn't even _exist _ifshe couldn't promise true confidentiality to her patients.

How many had she coaxed into telling her their deepest secrets here, not knowing they would run into outside ears? She was probably angrier about Amadeus Arkham than Owlman.

Her lips pressed together, and something flashed in her eyes. "This is no good," she said quietly, and looked him in the eyes. "We're not helping you at all, are we?"

He shrugged. Not one bit, but he didn't want to say it.

"We're just being…_used._"

She looked so wretched he wanted to take her hand, but it wasn't his place. She wasn't his friend, after all. Even if she really was on his side, even if he cared about her, even if being a good doctor was the most important thing to her after all…she wasn't his friend.

"So will you promise? Not to write anything down?" he asked.

"I'll do you one better," said Harlene. Something stubborn in the set of her jaw he'd never seen before. "If I'm rebelling anyway I might as well do it right. Stop hiding from me, J, and I'll get you out of here."

He wanted out. He wanted out _so much,_ and his heart leapt, but something in him twisted up into a little ball and cried because that meant he wouldn't see her anymore. But that was the smaller voice, the stupid one, because giving up everything to spend time around someone who'd never see you that way was too crazy even for him, and he had no trouble grinning his biggest, brightest grin. "That would be the _best_ Christmas present, Doctor Q."

"My friends call me Harley," she told him. And smiled fit to break his heart.

He was crazy, and he had a face like a fright mask, and he didn't have a home or a past or a future, unless they could steal that last one back. There was not one reason in the world he should let her suspect.

Harlene wouldn't laugh at him if she ever found out, because she was too professional and too kind, but that was really too bad, because he liked to hear her laugh. Besides being funny, he didn't have that much to offer. Funny, and interestingly insane.

So he lay back, and gave himself over to her in the only form she would ever want.

* * *

_**A/N: **__Part three pending. These two are the main ship for the fic, as I'm sure you'd noticed—normally Joker/Harley is a bad, but mirrorverse! :D_

_The Ellison short story discussed above is both real and considered a classic. Honestly 'Repent, Harlequin!' is practically a deconstruction of Batman and Joker all on its own; I almost feel cheap for using it. It also has a much longer version of the Civil Disobedience _excerpt at the front._ Oh, and Fins isn't the mirror version of anyone. Thanks again to all reviewers! (And just plain viewers.)_


	14. Pen and Margin

'Pen and Margin'

* * *

Lois Lane walked into Alex's office without an appointment. This was nothing new—Lois had a healthy contempt for the word 'no' and an adamantine focus that she mostly used in the service of truth and justice (Alex had once had an honest-to-god _nightmare_ about her turning to evil and his failing to notice until it was too late)—but usually she demanded his backing for some project or investigation, and a couple of times she'd barged in just long enough to get a single quote. (_Why didn't you just call? _he'd shouted after her. 'Your secretary screens your calls, and I wanted to see your face when you answered.'

Lois would probably never completely trust him. He'd given her his direct phone number anyway.)

"Good, you're not busy," she declared, striding up to his desk. He held up one bemused hand because he was _very obviously_ talking on the phone, and he actually did need to hear what his Japanese head of distribution was saying. Lois arched an eyebrow and slapped a bulging manila folder on top of the reports he'd been reading. Alex sighed.

"Sumanai, Nakata-san…iie, iie. Ima wa jyotto…hai. Ashita de tsudzutte kudasai. Hai, douzo. Shitsure." He set the phone down and arched his eyebrows right back. "I hope this is important, Miss Lane. Getting through pleasantries with that man is an exhausting process."

"No wonder, if you insist on using his language. Don't tell me he doesn't speak English."

"No, he does, but—well, it's worse than my Japanese, and if he doesn't understand me he won't admit it, just agree with everything. This way, the worst that can happen is I'm inadvertently offensive. My _point _being, I was in fact busy."

"You weren't in your lab. That's the only work you take really seriously. Find someone else to run this mess before you forget who you are."

Alex pressed his lips together. Lois was unpleasantly incisive sometimes. "If you interrupted me to tell me business isn't my business—"

"Don't be stupid. Now, who do we know who's indestructible and broke out of prison two months ago?"

Alex sat up sharply, heart thudding. Why had she wasted time bickering? "He's been spotted?"

"No." His heart rate dropped, simultaneously relieved and cheated. "But I think I've tracked him down," continued Lois.

"You've found his base?" _Before me?_ Alex muffled his wounded pride as best he could, and then found he'd wasted the effort when the reporter shook her head impatiently.

"No, I still think it's somewhere North, but I haven't gotten any further on that front. No, I tracked him _back._"

Alex drummed his fingers on the paperwork he should be doing, fading adrenaline sparking in his blood. "Is there a reason we should care how he got here from Krypton?"

"You are batting _zero_ today, Luthor. I've paid close attention to this man. He's American."

Alex raised a mild eyebrow at her. "Did you know there's a betting pool running on whether you'll die or be committed first?"

"_Luthor._" Lois Lane's large dark eyes glared at him, and Alex clicked his jaw apologetically. "You're intelligent enough to see it, if you'd just let yourself consider the facts. He's been hoodwinking us for years. All that 'by Rao' and 'the ways of Krypton,' but he does it _backwards. _The Kryptonian stuff is all top-level. If you pay attention, all his basic assumptions are the same as ours—well, besides the obvious racial prejudices—and he's demonstrated familiarity with figures ranging from Benedict Arnold to Michael Jackson.

"Have you ever seen him stumble over a cultural difference, or have to convert something from alien units or terminology?"

"He once gave me a five-minute lecture on why any machine containing a wire solenoid would be considered hopelessly backward on his homeworld." Alex felt compelled to be dry, but that didn't mean he was dismissing her point. Because that _was_ the best example he could come up with of Ultraman acting like he came from a really alien background; his scornful irritation had seemed entirely sincere.

Lois blew her hair out of her eyes. "He swings that cape around and throws out his catchphrases, but it's like…have you ever been to Boston around Saint Patrick's Day? It's emigrant chic. Krypton was destroyed _decades _ago. Ultraman grew up _on Earth_."

If she was right, this was…well, it didn't have any immediate combat applications, but if she was right this could be huge. Fighting someone with that kind of power required you to think as many steps ahead as possible, because if you had to stop to plan in the middle of open conflict, he'd already melted your face off and ripped out your spine. If Lois had figured out part of the key to Ultraman's thought processes…. "And you think you know where?"

"Here," she said. Flipped open the manila folder and withdrew an actual, physical newspaper clipping. _Freak Accident Kills Seven, Maims Four! _"Smallville, Kansas. Population 7,000. They had an unexpected meteor shower thirty-three years ago, several deaths, and are the source of some thirty percent of all Kryptonite known to be in circulation on Earth."

"I assume you have more than this." He tried not to sound supercilious. _Obviously_ this wasn't all; Lois wasn't an idiot. And the folder was very full.

"There were a few sites that got hit around that time—some kind of plume of stone must have blown our way after the planet cracked, I don't know, I'm not an astronomer. I pulled records from all of them, even the site in Nepal, but this is where I struck gold."

She flipped several more clippings and photocopies of clippings aside—this was real paranoia, when you wouldn't keep electronic records of your research—and pulled out what was by its format some kind of formal report. Police? "Twenty-five years ago, a 911 call brought first responders to a farm in the Smallville area, where they found the middle-aged homeowners dead in their kitchen, which also notably contained an overturned table and a large hole in one wall.

"Hiding in the pantry they discovered the couple's eight-year-old son, who reported that a 'big hairy monster' had smashed its way in and killed his parents. No other sightings of the creature or tracks were ever reported, but the sheriff closed the case as a mutant attack within a week. Apparently they have a fairly high monster population in that part of Kansas."

"Parents," Alex repeated, focusing on the salient point.

"Adoptive. The records there are rather irregular, too; he seems to have been a foundling." Lois continued spreading out documentation of her research without giving him the chance to read it, simply to prove it existed.

"The mother had some extended family, but they didn't want him, so he wound up in the system. He broke a foster-father's arm when he was nine and was moved to a group home, where he seems to have become socially dominant despite being one of the youngest children there. There was a suspicious death in the first year, though maybe the other boy really just drowned. He's listed as a runaway at the age of thirteen. After that point, all record of Clark Kent ends."

"You think he murdered his parents?"

"I think he threw the table at his parents, breaking his father's skull and crushing his mother's larynx. I think he then came up with a story, punched a hole in the wall, and called 911."

"At the age of eight?"

"A big hairy monster is about in line with the kinds of things kids blame stuff on." She sighed. "I don't think it was murder, really. Probably just a tantrum, but he was too powerful to be able to afford the kind of acting-out kids usually do around that age. Whatever was usual for Krypton, anyway.

"Look, I read over the forensic report on the Kent home, and the hole in the wall was made from the inside, after the couple was killed. No one considered that terribly suspicious at the time because many monsters _can_ use doors, so it could have snuck in and then made a violent exit, and the boy wasn't specific about when the smashing started. I don't know if he felt guilty then, or if he feels guilty now—I've never been completely sure just how much of a psychopath Ultraman really is. Alien, after all. But it all fits."

Alex nodded slowly. "Lois, you're a genius. I have told you that before, right?"

"No. I've got some other stuff that might be connected to him—mostly records of burglary and assault. There was a guy bullets bounced off of at a series of bank heists starting in Ohio, when Kent would have been seventeen. It links up pretty well with the assassination jobs he started picking up a few years later under the Ultraman name; we already knew about those."

Alex nodded. Broken necks and that distinctive heat-vision pair of cauterized holes through the face, mostly. One instance of a fist right through the chest cavity.

"_Then_ he goes back to Kansas." The latest piece of paper was the first unofficial one; it seemed to be a transcript typed up in Lois' personal shorthand. Alex was sure he could decipher it if he had to, but courtesy had prevented him from ever trying. She tapped the page with one ragged nail.

"The people from the next farm over, the Rosses, they bought a lot of the Kent land, and when I interviewed them they said they'd seen Clark once since 'the tragedy.' Apparently he came back to visit about ten years ago; they said he was acting pretty strange and basically demanded that they let him go over the property for some things of his that got left behind. They felt sorry for him, of course, and wished him the best of luck. Apparently he dug up most of one of their fields looking for an old root cellar, but they're not sure what he took from it. He set fire to the abandoned Kent house and hasn't been seen since."

Alex shook his head in amazement. It _did _all fit. "And a year later, Ultraman came on the scene as the Last Son of Krypton."

He'd taken control of Metropolis quite handily the first time, and seemed poised to conquer outward from there—only a lucky coincidence of the precise shade of red laser Alex had _happened _to use turning out to be the _exact_ wavelength that weakened Ultraman's powers, after inducing prolonged artificial darkness had turned out to be useless because his solar storage capacity was far higher than anticipated, had taken him down.

A result of this defeat had been a fixation on Metropolis—almost all Ultraman's schemes since then had centered or at least started there, and when they didn't it was usually a sign he was working with someone else. This was equal parts frustration and relief, since Alex _hated_ seeing his hometown in the crossfire of a madman's plans all the time, but on the other hand it would have been so much harder to defeat the man if he'd taken full advantage of his personal mobility to conduct operations somewhere new every time, and Alex had needed to track him to Kazakhstan or wherever.

…at some point, the damn alien had become his personal business.

Good thing so many other people were willing to help with that, because Mr. El (as he was called on most paperwork, to his annoyance, but Alex was sure if they started filing him under 'Kent' he'd have conniptions) broke out of prison so often that dealing with him took a lot of time away from running his actual _business_, and Wayne kept muscling in on major development contracts if he let his guard down. Luckily Luthorcorp played the commercial sector much better; Alex had a feel for what people needed and wanted that Wayne just couldn't match.

Also, a surprising number of the things he developed to combat Ultraman turned out to have commercial applications. (Bright side of fighting unstoppable alien menace: excellent reason to pull all-nighters and necessity as mother of invention.)

Alex rubbed at his face. Ultraman had run away from foster care at thirteen. That wasn't power and fury or alien malice; that was something he _understood. _He caught Lois' eye. "Do you ever pity him?"

"No," she said, flat and hard. "He's made his choices. He threw away all his opportunities, including the ones that only he had, to be just another bully. Why would I feel sorry for that?"

Alex steepled his hands on the desk. "You're lying."

Lois deflated slightly. "Maybe a little," she admitted. "Being the only survivor of your species is pretty wretched, and he doesn't seem to have had a nice life. But he _has _made his choices. What he did when he was eight was a mistake, but everything since then is character. And I'm not going to excuse him by blaming the system, because that's a disservice to everyone who comes out of foster care without turning into a self-involved murderer, powers or not."

A photocopy of a photograph was teased from the bottom of the stack—some sort of community picnic in the background; foreground middle-aged man, middle-aged woman, dark-haired, blue-eyed little boy, smiling cozeningly up at the indulgent look on the woman's face and the plate of cookies she was holding just out of his reach. "I got this from the Rosses. I think it's the only picture of that family that still exists."

She looked up at him. "If a nice couple had adopted _you_ when you were a kid, after your father died, and you'd accidentally blown up the house doing science a few years later and killed them, what would you have done?"

Alex stared at her.

"You'd have spent the rest of your life trying to make up for it," Lois answered herself. "He didn't. That's all I need to know."


	15. Outlaws II: Otocyon

Flying Outlaws II: 'Otocyon (Lotophagoi)'

* * *

**_A/N: _**_Warning for intravenous drug use this chapter. Roy Harper, ladies and gentlemen._

* * *

Grayson had slept all day, after a night of surveillance on the girl they'd been hired to kidnap, and gotten up around dusk looking in serious need of caffeine. "Kori around?" he'd grunted when he found Roy in the kitchen.

"Roof," said Roy. Watching the sunset right now, but she'd probably be up there for hours; she spent a lot of time looking at the stars, when she had a chance. She'd pointed out where she thought Tamaran was once, and when he teased her about not being _sure,_ she'd asked if _he'd_ be able to chart his way back to Earth from some planet he'd never heard of. Which, obviously, not. Then she'd dropped him on top of a flagpole and left him there, which was Starfire for irritated but not really mad; Roy might not be the ninja Grayson was, but he could climb down a friggin' flagpole.

Dick mumbled acknowledgement, showered briskly, and then went out for coffee—the apartment hadn't come with a coffee maker and none of them expected to stay here long enough for it to be worth buying one, and Grayson only drank the instant stuff when there was some reason not to go out for something better.

Roy finished his pizza in peace, threw away the plate, and thought for a second. Sightlines for his part in the upcoming abduction had been all scouted days ago, so he didn't have work till tomorrow night, unless Dick got ambushed on his coffee run or something and required rescue, and he'd finished the book he was reading yesterday, and the TV got basically no channels. He nodded to himself. Good as time as any. He dug out the rubbing alcohol and started sterilizing. At the kitchen table. Grayson might be back before he was done, but that wasn't Roy's problem.

Dick's face went tight every time he saw Roy with a needle. Or brown or white powder, or really anything related to drugs, and in response Roy had gotten even more blatant about it. He hadn't really been part of the scene back in Star, or even gotten high socially more than a couple of times—he had _work_, and besides, the people who grouped up around something like drugs were the ones who made it a big deal, and then the habit got out of control, and Roy had _way_ better things to do than turn into a junkie. Oliver had never cared so long as it didn't get in the way of work, and Kori had never minded, except one time when she'd wanted his attention and he'd been too high to care.

It was kind of a money sink now that he wasn't getting the same kind of cash flow he had with the syndicate, but so long as he wasn't taking it out of Dick's share, how was it his business?

A shared apartment meant kind of close quarters, and while Roy totally _could_ hole up in the bedroom, it wouldn't exactly be private anyway, since he didn't have his own space, and then he'd look like he felt like he had something to be ashamed of. He needed the stove to prep the dose anyway, since he'd never gotten in the habit of hauling a candle around, so kitchen table it was.

Dick came back in with two bags of groceries just as Roy finished wrapping self-adhesive tape around his bicep. His eyes flicked over the empty spoon, the needle lying on a clean towel spread on the tabletop, Roy's arm with a light tourniquet. Flared his nostrils at the kitchen smelling of rubbing alcohol and citric acid and the biting bitterness of heroin. Lips pressed thin, he closed the door firmly and crossed the kitchen in silence to put the food away.

Richard Grayson didn't believe in living on take-out. Richard Grayson didn't approve of illegal drugs. Richard Grayson was the biggest square of any wanted killer Roy had ever met, let alone robbed banks with.

He turned the syringe under his fingers on the white terrycloth. "Something you want to say?"

"No." Dick slid two half-gallons of milk onto the top fridge shelf with slightly more clunking than was probably necessary. (Richard Grayson _drank milk_. All by itself, out of a cup, like he was five.) A full gallon of milk meant he'd also bought breakfast cereal that he expected everyone to eat. _And_ that he thought they'd still be here day after tomorrow.

(…this team was starting to feel slightly like being married, except with significantly less sex. Not that he particularly wanted it to contain more sex; he wasn't all that into dudes, and team orgies sounded like a spectacularly dysfunctional idea, even if Kori would go along, which she wouldn't because Superwoman had given her so many issues in that area Roy had once seen her break a man's neck for wolf-whistling at her on a bad day. Putting up with passive-aggressive bitchiness without getting sex out of the deal was kind of a new thing for Roy, though, and definitely not one of the pluses of working in a team.)

He made a note to get laid sometime soon. But for the moment, arguing with bitchy assassin about drugs. He raised his eyebrows.

"I think there is."

"Nope. Until it starts causing problems for the rest of us, it's your business what you put in your body. Do your thing."

Roy snorted. "Well, that's real big of you."

"Or don't do your thing." Dick was now emptying a paper bag of fruit onto the countertop between fridge and sink. So far as Roy was concerned this was the natural habitat of dirty dishes, but whatever. Now it was the habitat of five bananas, two pears, and three bright red apples.

"I don't need your permission, I'm just getting a little tired of you making disapproving faces like somebody's prim little granny."

Their stealth specialist turned around. He might be annoyed; it was hard to tell. His hair was falling in his eyes. "I haven't said anything."

"You don't have to."

Grayson rolled his shoulders in a little shrug, his eyes flicking away to the tabletop where the bag of powder and the waiting needle lay, and then to the floor. "I guess I just don't like to see you taking that kind of risk."

"What, and jumping off five hundred foot cliffs into the sea is safe? We're not taking a chance ripping off superheroes? _Work_ is risky. This is nice, stable recreation in comparison. I'm careful." He'd been more careful in Star, when he'd had a regular supplier who knew better than to mess with him by giving him anything but the best, but he still didn't buy from just anyone, or do anything stupid with his needles.

Dick shook his head. "I didn't mean disease and dosage, risky. It's just a bad idea to need something like that."

"I don't _need_ it, Grayson. It's just a sometimes thing."

"That's what you say now." Their team ninja shook his head again; you could have sworn he was staring right through the apartment wall. "It's bad enough our bodies come pre-loaded with addictions like food and sleep without adding extra, more complicated things."

Roy could have argued more about whether he was an addict, but he wasn't likely to change Dick's mind, and it was better tactics to turn the conversation around on him.

"You don't like food and sleep?" The guy was a light sleeper and got up in the night a lot, but Roy wouldn't have pegged him for a real insomniac, and he sure _acted_ like he enjoyed eating.

"I like them fine. It would just be nice not to _need_ them." The thousand-yard stare opened out to even further away, this haunted expression that flashed across his face sometimes; Roy wasn't used to feeling things like sympathy, and hated reminders that working under (aka belonging to) Superwoman and Owlman had been very different from working for the Archer. Every time one of his teammates got that look, he tried to change the subject. If Wayne had starved Dick as a kid, or forced him to stay awake for four days straight until he couldn't tell hallucination from reality, or whatever, Roy _did not want to know._

Maybe it wasn't even the Owl; living on the run probably made eating and sleeping inconvenient necessities sometimes. Just because Roy had never gotten to that desperate point personally didn't mean Dick hadn't. He wasn't Ultraman. He hadn't had Kori to watch his six, either.

Roy shot Grayson a hostile look, because he'd taken a lot of the fun out of shooting up by getting his doom and gloom in the anticipation stage, and stretched out his arm again. Not defiantly, because Grayson didn't have any authority over him to defy. The veins were standing out nicely, and he located the main one in his elbow (if he was an _addict_ he'd have scarred it up too much to use by now; fuck you Greywing) and reached for the syringe.

"You definitely get to do the poking next time I need an IV," said Dick. He had Talon-face on again, despite the fact that he'd just said something that was probably a joke, which most likely meant Roy had actually managed to hurt his feelings.

Or maybe he was embarrassed to have exposed a weakness from his past like that. Roy didn't really get why Grayson kept acting like he trusted him. Sure, Roy'd introduced him as 'my friend Dickhead' to his contacts in Portugal, but Roy had had plenty of friends he didn't trust an inch. Sometimes the hardened outlaw assassin acted like such a _kid._

"Duh," was all he said in reply. "Have you seen Kori trying to be delicate? She'd probably stab straight through your elbow."

Dick's mouth bent up at the sides, although the rest of his face still wasn't moving. "She's not that bad."

Roy shook his head. "When are you even gonna need an IV, you super-healing weirdo?" he asked, aligning the needle. If the asshat was going to just keep standing there, he could just feel free to watch.

"The electrum repairs tissue better than fluids," Dick shrugged, watching the hovering syringe. "If I bleed enough, an intravenous electrolyte solution is a really good idea. I _can_ just drink a lot of Gatorade, but there's a high chance of passing out before I rebalance."

_Stop it with the fucking trust,_ Roy thought viciously, and slipped the needle under his skin.

"Roy," Dick said.

"Shut up, Grayson."

He depressed the plunger, emptying the syringe into his vein, his pulse picking up in expectation.

He gave himself maybe twelve seconds until the rush, and if Grayson said one more goddamned word…well, he didn't actually know what he'd do; attacking a death machine in human form right after shooting up reflected the level of bad judgment Roy had mostly had beaten out of him already even when they'd _first_ met. Dick had been maybe fourteen or fifteen, then, and scary as fuck. Nine more seconds…

Only the exact control of his reflexes he'd once relied on to work with Talon without looking like a twitchy basketcase kept him from tearing a great, hazardous rip in his own vein with the half-withdrawn needle, when _something_ hit the roof of the building with a crash that shook the walls. Moments later something else landed outside with an even bigger _thump._

Roy slid the needle the rest of the way out and put it absently back on the towel while exchanging a glance with Grayson. Dick flicked his eyes upward. Roy nodded. Dick raised an eyebrow; Roy rolled his eyes; Dick shrugged, and then pelted out the door and down the hall toward the stairs. Roy, with the thick taste of heroin hitting his tongue from the inside, grabbed his bow and a quiver from the corner, because guns were great but they were _loud,_ and plenty of things that were fast enough to dodge bullets didn't even notice an arrow coming until they'd already been shot. He paused, sliced the tie off his arm with an arrowhead, and followed.

They were a team. Kori didn't fight without their backup. No matter how terrible the timing.

The rush hit Roy halfway up the stairwell, maybe ten seconds after the drug had hit his bloodstream, and he had to stop for a second and clutch at the banister, and he didn't _care_ what was happening on the roof because Jesus _fuck_, he always forgot just how good this felt.

He hadn't even taken a big hit. Jesus.

Fucking _H_ Christ.

It was probably almost a minute before his head rolled back from the clouds and he got up off his knees, picked up his bow again, and continued toward the roof, in a lot less hurry than before. Building hadn't come down around his ears while he was in his happy place, or even shaken again that he'd noticed, so what were the odds it was something Starfire and Greywing couldn't handle?

The smallest of the three crashes so far rocked the aging timbers of the building, and he shrugged, spun an arrow to the string, and picked up the pace a little. At least he hadn't run into any pissed-off neighbors stupid enough to run toward the sound of smashing. Heh. Only he and Dick were that stupid.

* * *

**_A/N: _**_For the record, I do not endorse intravenous drug use, bank robbery, or kidnapping. These Outlaws are bad guys and making various questionable life choices. Roy here is, in fact, not drug-dependent (thus far), and is being about as smart as you _can _be about doing something this stupid, but that doesn't mean he's safe. Oh, and shooting up alone is actually a pretty bad idea, because then there's no one to call you an ambulance if you, say, stop breathing. Which happens._

_But hey, teamwork, teamwork's good. And communication. And drinking plenty of milk.  
_


	16. Quinzel III: Harlequin

Quinzel III: Harlequin

* * *

_**A/N:**__ So I'm going to read the total lack of feedback last chapter as distinctly negative feedback. I want to think the problem was my terrible, terrible title; think it was probably the drug abuse, and worried it's actually the Outlaws. If you guys hate the Flying Outlaws, please tell me, because they have another two chapters coming otherwise. _

_With that out of the way, we may return to the final installment of Mad Love (Mirror Remix)._

* * *

The knock on the door came around dawn. J pulled it open, and found his smile frozen on his lips.

"Hey," said Harlene Quinzel. She was wearing a red coat and a fluffy hat with earflaps, and her cheeks were bright with cold. If she had been less vibrantly alive, she might have resembled an exquisite doll.

"Harlene," he said. Then he stomped on his own foot, proving that yes, he _was_ awake, and should not say any of the things he was thinking.

"You need a new hideout," she told him, smiling. "If I could find you, so can Owlman. All he needs is the sense to send a harmless-looking minion asking until they find a friend of yours."

"Ah…" That was probably true. Plenty of people knew where his place was, and they weren't all especially paranoid. He _had_ to start thinking more like a fugitive. Everything had changed subtly in the seven months he'd spent inside, though, and he was still finding the lay of the land, and definitely hadn't thought to put out a request to please _not_ tell anyone where to find him.

Maybe he could go stay with Ed for a while; Alonzo'd offered to have him, but he had three kids and his niece these days and there wasn't really space. Especially for someone who might have a homicidal maniac in a bird suit come down like the hammer of some feathery god at any moment. Harvey Dent, maybe? He hadn't heard from him since before Arkham.

J huffed, half amusement and half frustration. "Thanks for the heads-up. Harlene, what are you _doing _here?"

Harlene looked wry. "We screwed up. Footage turned up of me breaking you out."

Jokester gripped the edge of the door. "What happened?"

"Well, I'm pretty sure Bruce Wayne would have strangled me to death right then and there, if there hadn't been witnesses."

J laughed. "Yeah, it's a pretty mutual antipathy," he admitted. "But what about _you?_"

Harlene shrugged, her droll nonchalance perfectly undisturbed. "I've had all my licenses to do pretty nearly everything suspended. They only hadn't fired me because they wanted to drag me through a whole conduct investigation first, so I quit."

J pressed a fist against his mouth to hold in his horror. He should never have asked her for help. Other people weren't supposed to suffer for him. "I'm so sorry," he said through his knuckles.

She laughed, bright and brassy. "It's okay, J. I lost everything, but that just means there's nothing holding me back. I wanted to come with you all along. I just wasn't brave enough."

Gales of particularly mad laughter were building in his throat, but this for once was not the time, and Jokester throttled them down. She didn't mean it like that. And he couldn't let this happen. "Tell them I forced you," he urged her. "Tell them I tricked you. I'll play up any role you want, just get them to let you go home."

She shook her head. "I don't want to. J, I've devoted my whole life to sanity—"

"Exactly!" he interjected.

"And it sucked! I was turning into such a selfish bitch. Arkham's a hellhole, and I don't want to be part of any of it anymore." She moved forward, a little, so she was less on the doorstep and more on the threshold, laid her hand against the doorframe. "I want to be crazy with you."

Now Jokester laughed, because he had to. Knowing it might drive her away to be laughed at, and knowing she'd never gotten angry about it before. Had he really made it sound so good, his life? He loved it, sure, would love it more with her around even if she never saw him as more than a hilarious friend with a cut-up face, but _he _was supposed to be the one who made crazy decisions on the spur of the moment. Harlene was too clever to let herself in for this kind of life. "You've never even seen me out of the clinical setting," he argued. "Half the time you've known me I've been on drugs."

"Only half?" she teased.

He rolled his eyes. "I really hate those pills." He slumped against the open door. He'd laughed in her face and she was standing on his doorstep in the frost, cheerfully unemployed because of him, and of course he wasn't going to turn her away but there had to be something they could do, some way to _fix_ this. (He was aware his need to fix things bordered on the pathological, but that didn't make it a part of himself he was willing to give up.) "Harlene…"

"I let my friends call me Harley," she reminded him. He raised his face to smile at her, and her hand left the door to…rest against his cheek. J stopped breathing.

"And I'm kinda hoping," she added, even more quietly, as her thumb ran just above the roughness of scar there, "that I can get the world to call me Harlequin."

Apart from that one session where she'd held his hand, they'd never touched in Arkham. Professional distance, after all, and he was known to be dangerous, and _he _certainly hadn't been going to risk reaching out and frightening her, or giving himself away. Now she was leaning across his doorsill, cupping his face in her warm tiny hand, and for this moment nothing was funny and he didn't even mind. "Harlequin," he whispered.

For the second time he could ever remember, he was terrified. This was a terrible idea. But hey, he was crazy, right? He smothered an inappropriate giggle.

He bent. Slowly enough she would have more than enough time to draw away again if he'd misunderstood, but she didn't, and he kissed her. Badly, he was sure—he'd only kissed a few girls that he could remember, and that had all been before Owlman had carved up his face, and his lips didn't really work the same way anymore—but Harlene didn't seem to care. She kissed him _back_.

It was over quickly, not so much out of failure of nerve as because he'd already been low on oxygen when they started, and he leaned lightheaded against the doorframe as she grinned up at him. Definitely smug. Maybe she was already as crazy as he was.

"There you go, Mister J," she told him. Stood up on her toes and dropped another quick, sweet kiss at the corner of his mouth.

Then she had her arms around his neck, hoisted herself off the ground and pivoted her weight around him so that suddenly she was inside, and then with a wicked grin pushed off the doorframe so he had to stumble back a few steps or fall over, and kicked the door shut behind them, before landing on her feet again. "And there I go," she announced, sounding perfectly satisfied.

He'd spent a lot of time in her office, plush and book-lined, with excessively comfortable chairs, and while he did have some books and plenty of color, the best thing you could really say about his room was 'not dirty.' Even if he'd had a lot of funds at his disposal, he moved too frequently to get really settled and homey anywhere, and he felt self-conscious about everything from the hotplate to the unmade bed and the draft under the door. Harlene twinkled around at all of it, and pulled off her fluffy hat as if to emphasize that she intended to stay. The same smile pulled at the corner of her mouth that she got when she was winning at checkers.

J bit the inside of his cheek. This was bad. He _knew_ this was bad, and he was being selfish, and he shouldn't. Harlene deserved so much better. But it _wasn't his decision to make._

"You sure about this…Harley?" he asked her curtain of yellow hair, as she strolled away to the corner where he piled all the odds and ends that made costumes. He'd never seen it loose before.

Harlene turned back around with a black half-mask pressed to her face, and suddenly he grasped the sense of unbridled _freedom_ she packed into every motion now, in the glint of tiny white teeth and the jaunty thrust of her elbow. "I am _so_ sure."

Freedom was the most important thing in the world.

"Well…" he said slowly. "I guess, in the pantomime, Harlequin always wins in the end…"

Harlene threw her head back and laughed that laugh he loved, delicate notes building and resounding until they could have been a cathedral at matins. Swift certain fingers tied the mask behind her skull and picked up a cheap felt jester's hat, which jingled as she crammed it on and crossed the brief distance back to him. She tossed her head in a flurry of little bells and golden silk, and hooked a hand around his neck once again. "Kiss me, my Fool."

That was the real line from the film, J realized, not the version you usually heard, and he reached up to brush his fingers through her hair, not even trying not to smile. "You know that was originally the villain's line, doncha Harl?"

She did. That catch to her mouth. "Would it matter, if I was the bad guy?"

"Yes." It would matter so much it would probably kill him. "But you're not."

"I'm not," she agreed. Before Harlequin was a hero or a trickster, he was a devil. That was why the mask was black. Through Harley's mask her blue eyes were fixed on him, and J knew he'd give almost anything to keep them that warm. "You're not getting rid of me, Mister J."

February couldn't put a dent in the rising sun. "Wouldn't dream of it."

* * *

_**A/N:**__ Film quoted is _A Fool There Was _(1915), featuring a wicked seductress, and J was referring to the Harlequinade when he said Harlequin always wins, but he has a pretty good romantic record as a sidekick, too. (Traditionally, when you see Harlequin and Clown as a duo, Clown is the idiot role. I don't think J minds; I assume Joker doesn't know.)  
_


	17. A Marshaling

'A Marshaling'

* * *

_**A/N:**__ I'd like to thank last chapter's reviewers for their encouragement: TheSoulsDepths, Skalidra, SwordStitcher, and Rachel. You are beautiful people. Sorry to repay you by disappearing for two weeks; real life made demands, including most recently a road trip for which I turned out to have packed two left boots. O.o  
_

_This is short! But I have longer things that will be done soon. There is a cast list at the bottom; anybody who doesn't need to refer to it at all can consider themselves a Batman Villain Expert, Level Three. I'll make badges._

* * *

The click of a short-wave radio sounded across a Gotham rooftop.

"Team Clown, ready. Sound off."

"Team Earth, in position," Basil's voice muttered over the line from street level. He and Pam, as the big guns, were taking the frontal assault as soon as Jokester and Harlequin got the distraction rolling.

There was strain hiding in the mutter; Basil said battle nerves were nothing compared to stage fright, but J was pretty sure he only said that so nobody easier to kill would try to take his place in front of bullets. Still, the man was first and foremost a fellow performer, not a giant shapeshifting hammer, no matter how hard he could hit when he needed to. J wouldn't forget that.

"Team Sky, in position." Garfield breathed, the hum of his jets and van Cleer's wings buzzing through the microphone.

This was Moth-and-Flame's first ever premeditated team-up with the Circus, the first time they'd worked together at _all_ since the friendly young Firefly had slipped up and given his mentor's identity away during the spring flooding emergency, and considering that Mothman was the ridiculously proud type, if this didn't go well it might be the last time, too.

"Team Sea, holding position," Waylon growled. He was lurking in the river, ready to locate and secure the hostages while the rest of them drew fire and kept the traffickers pinned down. Between his strength and sense of smell he was the best choice, but letting his friends fight without his support always went against his grain.

A second's silence hung on the air.

"Team Geek?" J prompted, tapping his radio. They were supposed to be inside already, hacking and laying gas bombs; if they'd been rumbled everything needed to slam into motion five minutes ago. "Everything okay?"

"We're fine," Jonathan's voice came on the channel, a faintly exasperated whisper. "Ed and Harvey are still sulking about our team name."

J clicked his tongue. "Remind them their codenames are geeky puns that prove they are not qualified to name things. You guys ready?"

"Team Geek is go," the neurochemist affirmed, the strength in his voice, where not long ago there would have been nothing but fear and trembling, giving Jokester's heart an upward boost. He and Harlequin shared a grin.

"Okay. On my mark. Don't hurt anybody _too_ bad."

"No promises," Ed grumbled.

Those kidnappers weren't going to know what hit 'em.

* * *

**Cast Rundown:** _Basil Karlo_ was the first Clayface—originally a non-meta master of disguise, but retconned since. (Currently going by Clayface, which was still his biggest movie role, but later to be known as 'The Reformer.' You may groan and throw fruit.) _Garfield Lynns_ is Firefly, a former pyrotechnician, and _Cameron van Cleer _is the millionaire alias of ex-con _Drury Walker_, known to canon as Killer Moth.

Who did take Firefly as his sidekick for a while, in the comics, and who is not (let me clarify; my beta misunderstood) a giant acid-spitting moth-monster. Charaxes was a later development.

_Waylon Jones _is still (The) Crocodile and _Pamela Eisley _goes by Ivy. :] Team Geek consists of our friends Scarecrow, Enigma, and The Bicameral Man. Jason has not yet been recruited.


	18. Beware the Court of Owls

'Beware the Court of Owls.'

* * *

_**A/N: **__This chapter takes place a little less than three years before 'Freebird (All the Dying Children),' and some fourteen before 'Owl and the Dead Boy,' where this episode was first alluded to. Which also puts the Flying Outlaws about fourteen years out, for those who're counting. _

_It is dedicated to this story's main beta, LordAlforbia, because it was built on his ideas, and he's been demanding that I finish it for months. (Though some credit goes to Skalidra for seconding the request and prompting me to explain my writer's block at such length that it broke. Reviewers rock.)_

* * *

Washington DC slept in the heavy warmth of a late June evening. It was closer to midnight than to sunset, and while some quarters of the city were not yet asleep, and several staff members were working hard in the White House's West Wing, the heart of the presidential residence lay dim and calm in its peaceful green island of lawn and garden. All seemed well.

It was not.

_**Beware the Court of Owls…**_

An assassin had got into the White House. It had been a long time since this had happened, and longer still since one had come so far, but there it was. He was the best, and he was here.

_**That watches all the time…**_

Four Secret Servicemen had died silently where they stood guard in the Center Hall. Their bodies lay in sight of three separate cameras, and when someone discovered that the men responsible for monitoring those cameras were also dead, an uploaded virus deleting all footage, that was when the assassin's presence would most likely be made known. He should have fifteen minutes.

_**Ruling from a shadowed perch…**_

If Wilson had not won a second term, this would not have been necessary, or if he had heeded earlier warnings. But the President was above all things a proud man, and not an easily frightened one, and although he had not led a peaceful life, and had knowingly set himself up against corruption and evil, he did not really understand even now just how deep the shadows in his own country went.

Even the shadiest side of politics had still its darker brother.

_**Behind granite and lime…**_

Hinges in such an important piece of national heritage were oiled scrupulously. The last door on the left eased open without a sound. If the windows to the balcony had been open this might have caused a change in the wind, but when the air failed to stir, the young man in red and black slipped around the door frame, glanced quickly around the curving walls for surprises, and focused on the sofa that looked away from the door, and the two figures that occupied it. Imperceptibly, he relaxed a hair. His information had been correct. Targets located. The difficult part was over.

_**They watch you at your hearth…**_

The President's older son was home on leave this week, after graduating from West Point. Not at the head of his class, but close enough. Close enough. His parents were both very proud, and he was generally understood to have a bright future ahead once he took up his commission. (Always assuming he survived deployment, but that was military life.)

As was their custom when the older brother was home, both sons were sitting up late in the Yellow Oval Room, catching up. They'd always close, despite the gap between their ages, as brothers who have been some of the only constants in one another's lives often grow close—Grant had been almost more father to Joseph than their actual father had been, much as they _knew_ he loved them, and had spent much of his leave doing his best to soothe his brother's fear that starting a military career meant he would become just as busy and unreachable. He'd be gone most of the time, but he'd write. He'd even call.

Tall and lean, Grant might be the one walking in his father's footsteps, but Joey with his golden curls was the apple of his mother's eye and the darling of the nation. He started high school next year, and everyone was always surprised he was thirteen already. He was small for his age, and much too adorable to be a teenager.

_**They watch you in your bed…**_

Their parents had early engagements tomorrow—the President actually had to be halfway across the country by eight AM—and were consequently asleep, but Joey and Grant got to sleep in, so they were burning the midnight oil.

The Yellow Oval Room wasn't the most relaxing place in the White House, being furnished with fussy French antiques, but Joey liked the view over the balcony, and he liked to have his family as close together as possible when he could. The sitting room next door, which adjoined the Presidential bedroom on the other side, was a little _too_ close if they were going to be talking, since Mom and Dad were both light sleepers, but retiring to one of their own bedrooms across the hall would be too far. And he liked round rooms. They were strange and silly and not something you got in normal houses.

Both boys had the paranoia necessary to public figures, and Grant had Army training as well, but neither imagined any need to avoid predictable behavior patterns in what should be the most secure house in America.

_**Speak not a whispered word of them…**_

Neither of them noticed silent footsteps on the heavy rug behind them.

"I'm not a little kid anymore," Joey insisted, bouncing a little on ivory upholstery.

"Yeah, well, just stick with it a little longer. You might only have a few months before your voice starts breaking, and then Mom will be out her little angel anyway."

"If I get to be as tall as you, I don't even care."

Grant pinched his little brother's ear, drawing out a yelp, muffled in consideration of the late hour. "Hey, now, if your grown-up singing voice turns out to suck, you'll miss—" He never finished saying what Joey would miss. The sentence ended in a gurgle, as a knife jerked across his windpipe.

**_Or they'll send Talon for your head._**

The first disruption of the plan came when Joey Wilson failed to spend a second paralyzed with horror. Even half a second would have been adequate. Perhaps even a quarter. Instead, he moved. Instantly. Arm involuntarily outstretched toward his dying brother, he flung himself off the couch, away from the he-didn't-know-what-but-he'd-been-trained-to-dodge-without-needing-to-think.

If he'd been older, or trained just a little better, or even just a little less utterly startled to be attacked _here_ of all places, he might have torn his eyes off his brother in time not to put a spin in his leap. But he did, and landed facing the assassin.

It wasn't even half a second he spent staring. The light fading from his older brother's eyes and the tall, pale figure clothed in black that loomed behind him, masked, scarlet blooming from his shoulders like a compromise between blood and silk, color almost matching the stains pouring down Grant's shirt and covering the upraised knife.

It wasn't even half a second, but it was time enough for Talon to vault the antique table and the ruined brocaded sofa where his first target's last breath still bubbled out of him. Time enough for Joey to fill his leaden lungs. And then time enough for Talon to seize him by the wrist before he could escape was time enough for him to let the breath out in a scream.

Joseph Wilson sang lead soprano in his choir. The sound of his scream burst out higher and louder than most sirens, cutting through the silent night, and Talon winced slightly from the simple pain of it, though it did not slow him down. He jerked the captured arm toward him, released it, slapped the freed hand over his target's mouth and bore him to the floor before he could gather the will to fight, teeth bared. Brought the bloody knife around again. His eyes behind their mask stared into the wide, terrified green ones of the White House's own small angel, and did not look away as he struck.

As the sharp edge of the knife sliced through Joey's neck, the door to the Presidential suite burst open with a wild shout, which had the exact intended effect of drawing attention. Talon was already on his feet, instinctively, before the door entirely opened.

Slade Wilson did not wear his eyepatch to bed. There were probably people who would care what this meant about him personally and his relationship with his wife, that she was apparently comfortable looking at the grisly hole in her husband's face where one of his own men had shot him, years ago in the war, after then-Lieutenant-Colonel Wilson had waded into the middle of tense internal altercation over _exactly_ how the US Army was expected to treat enemy civilians. (He'd gotten a medal, later. It was not a fair trade, but he said he wasn't sorry for anything but failure to duck.)

Talon was not someone who gave a damn about any of that, or about the questionable sartorial decision that was orange and blue plaid flannel pajamas. To him, the only notable qualities of the President at this time were the wickedly sharp cavalry saber he had raised in one hand, and the massive handgun he had trained on the assassin's face, as his child's blood flowed over Talon's feet.

Similarly, the only interesting feature of the dashing brunette behind him was her state of armament.

This was not the Adeline Wilson who hosted elegant parties, charmed foreign diplomats, and appeared on tabloid covers pilloried for her taste in shoes. It was not even the woman who had spent the past five years forcing the FBI, CIA, and NSA to share vital information across agency lines before it obsoleted itself. The white silk nightgown faded into insignificance beside the SG 552 short combat rifle slung over her shoulder. Sighting around her husband, she pulled the trigger.

What the man who'd sent his Talon to gouge out a politician's heart had perhaps not fully appreciated was that the President and First Lady were a former Colonel and Captain, and had met when she gave him his Special Forces training. The young man found himself caught between a spray of bullets from the First Lady's carbine and the President, emptying the Desert Eagle as he charged with upraised sword—daring, even for the best-trained soldier; despite being a pistol, it was not normally a one-handed gun. Bulletholes pocked historically significant plaster. A lamp shattered. Two antique Louis XVI style chairs and an American Impressionist painting were beyond recovery.

Talon ducked, using the bleeding child as a sort of prone human shield because his mother was shooting high, not willing to risk hitting him. Two seconds later her magazine was empty, and while she reloaded, the assassin flipped backward out of the way of the President's scything sword, leaving the minimal protection of Joey's vicinity. He'd been hit twice in the lower back, but barely seemed to notice.

The assassin knocked the singing blade aside with his red-stained knife as it made its next slice toward him, stronger than he looked, and then…paused a breathless instant as the President recovered from the too-powerful swing, not taking advantage of the opening, looking from the still-gasping child on the floor in his spreading pool of blood, to the woman raising her assault rifle again, to the man swinging back around to chop him apart, face twisted with rage, both hands on the saber-hilt now, his empty gun thrown aside.

The moment broke not with a bullet or a sword-blow, but with a toss of the assassin's bloody dagger toward Joey. The First Lady dismissed Talon instantly in favor of throwing herself forward to deflect the blade that had already cut her son once. It clattered against the barrel of her gun, lodged in the wooden floor, and she stayed on her knees where she'd landed, both hands on Joey's neck to stem the flow of blood now that she was close enough. His breath was failing, but as a soldier she knew very well that so long as he was still bleeding, he was not yet dead. "Cover," she snapped out, not even looking up to confirm her husband's compliance.

Single eye narrow, the President charged, and the assassin flung himself back toward the wall in a billow of cape that ended with another, longer dagger in his hand. He lashed out, scored a thin line of blood up the side of Wilson's face. His weapon was smaller and his reach shorter, but it was much, much more maneuverable, and the assassin was controlling the fight. For a moment he closed, too far within his opponent's range for the sabre to swing with any speed, and the bigger man nearly took hold of him in the instant it took to lay a slash across his ribs and leap back, light as a bird, concealed within the folds of his scarlet cape.

The stand-off broke with the sound of running footsteps. The surviving Secret Service was finally coming to the rescue, two minutes and forty-six seconds late. Talon's eyes flickered to the door, and he moved left along the curve of the wall, toward the windows on the southern end of the oval. The President tried to stop him.

This was unacceptable. It was impermissible to be caught, to be questioned, and a Talon did not have the luxury of taking his secrets to the grave. If they killed him, he would wake to captivity. The second target might yet die of his injuries. Retreat was the only option. In a sudden furious burst of energy, Talon struck Wilson's sword aside, slammed a kick into his stomach that sent him back several paces, and flipped into the air.

There was a glass door in the southwest corner of the room, but that was much too far; without hesitation he smashed heel-first through the eastmost window onto the Truman balcony, followed closely by an enraged sword-wielding father.

It would have been wiser, perhaps, to allow the assassin to retreat, but wisdom is not a quality often foremost in the grief-stricken. From inside the bloodstained yellow room Adeline's voice barked out, furious at the delay but more furious still at the possibility that an instant's further delay might be added to getting medics to her son. A moment's grim smile stretched across Slade's face. If there was any hope, she would take care of it.

He would deal with the murderer.

With a flurry of blows, Slade drove the slim figure along the balcony, hoping to corner him against the front of the building. He was stronger, but the other man was just as fast, and ducked and leapt like nothing human, rather than risk a still parry and the chance of being crushed. It had become clear earlier—when he slashed at the ribs instead of the gut, when he fled—that the killer was not here for him. The targets had been only Joseph and Grant. Slade himself was supposed to stay alive, to live with the loss. Someone hated him very much indeed.

Finally, he landed a deep cut across the assassin's collarbone, and found just a little more strength to pour into following it up, his teeth bared in satisfaction. Except…as he watched the blood was already stopping, and then the cut had sealed itself, and as the acrobat of a fighter took advantage of his distraction, vanished entirely.

Those bullets that had seemed to strike him earlier had not been grazes after all. _Metahuman_, Slade thought, and shook off his surprise, and fought harder.

He'd never let anyone call him a supersoldier. Not publicly. He'd had a few separate reasons at the time of his insistence, but ultimately he was sure it had saved his political career. People would cheer for a supersoldier, and follow his adventures, especially if heavily fictionalized, but they wouldn't _vote_ for him. The 'super' made him too unlike them. Apart.

It wasn't as if it was accurate anyway. The enhancements weren't that dramatic—he was just a little faster than he'd been before. A little stronger, a little sharper…a little harder to kill. It gave him an edge.

It was an edge he'd dearly needed more than once, overseas. And he needed it now. Now, against one young man, one young man who had stolen his sons from him, he needed every bit of speed and stamina that had kept him alive through rains of bullets and hells of sand and acrid smoke. Every bit rage could summon. He struck, the assassin parried. The boy lunged, and he was forced to duck. His sword sliced across the boy's bicep and the blood was ignored; the wicked knife nicked his knee and it cost him a little bit of maneuverability.

He had this disadvantage, as well: his opponent was fighting to escape. It meant his life was in slightly less danger, which he didn't care about, but it meant that if he relented at all, he could lose without taking another hit.

"Who sent you?" he hissed. Most assassination attempts were made by amateurs—lunatics, for the most part, motivated by some personal hatred or other desperate emotion. They might be able to fight, in some cases, but they were sloppy and usually foiled by security measures long before they got anywhere near their targets. This was a professional. Not even a fanatic; whoever hated him, they had sent a proxy. There was nothing personal here; Slade could feel no heart behind the young man's blade.

For _nothing personal_ he had cut his boys' throats.

And the question hung unanswered, cut to ribbons by both flashing blades.

Finally he smashed through the assassin's guard, disarmed him, laid him open against the banister, got his hands around his throat. He would not escape. _He would not escape._

At first, the reaction was the normal human one, though improbably calm—his captive reached up to tear at the grip cutting off his air. Then, in almost the same instant, the smaller man folded himself up, impossibly small, braced the soles of his feet against Slade's chest, and began to push. It was a race now, whether he would strangle the murderer unconscious before the strength of his fingers lost out to the strength of his opponent's legs.

As he felt his grasp slipping, he snarled and snatched at the undefended face before it slipped out of reach. His fingernails left deep scores down the assassin's forehead and across his left cheek, and he came away with the stiff black mask in his hand.

For a moment, they stared one another in the face, Slade's one narrow eye and one dark pit meeting the boy's wide, impossibly blue gaze. And he _was_ a boy, the old soldier saw in that moment, younger than he'd realized, not even Grant's age. Maybe not even old enough to enlist. And his huge blue eyes were almost, almost utterly empty.

And then he ducked, as if he thought there was still time to hide his features, ducked and then _lunged,_ slashing his gloved hand across the front of Slade's thigh so that his right leg buckled from a cut that should not exist. And then he had wheeled away, not taking advantage of the opening, and vaulted over the railing, abandoning any attempt to climb the pillars in favor of a sheer forty-foot drop.

The scarlet cape billowed up as he jumped, presenting an ideal target even for a man whose right leg was failing him, and Slade grabbed a handful, only to be left holding nothing but fabric, as it popped loose at the shoulders and left his enemy falling free. Only then did the Secret Service finally spill onto the balcony, in time to drag the furiously struggling President back from the edge of a drop he was in no condition to make.

Talon hit the lawn running. Bullets shredded the air from three directions, some of them embedding themselves in him or hitting and bursting out the far side in a fountain of blood, but long after he should have fallen, the young assassin ran on. Past the fountain, lit in floodlights that flattened him to the detached shadow of a boy, cut loose. Two security officers intercepted his course enough to accost him as he approached the fence—a lunge, and the fugitive had grabbed the taller, darker one by the elbow and pulled him close, between himself and the other guard's point-blank bullets, and brought his bare hand stabbing up into his captive's gut in the same motion. He bowled the second man over with the spasming body of his comrade, viscera spilling to his knees, clambered up the fence in instants, and was gone.

Slade sagged in his bodyguard's grasp, and they cautiously let him go. He ignored them, staring across the South Lawn toward the Washington Monument, where the assassin had disappeared.

He should have been doomed. He was fleeing onto open ground, in a striking black costume, in a city swarming with federal personnel, after making himself into Public Enemy Number One. Security would draw tight as a noose after an attack like this. Barricades would already be going up. No one would leave the city tonight, and no one even casually answering his description would go unquestioned.

And yet Slade felt in his bones, as the blood from his leg slowed too late, that no one would be able to hold that young man. It was up to him.

Slade had made many promises in his life. He had sworn himself to his country once as soldier and once as commander. He had sworn to his best friend never to leave him behind, and almost lost everything keeping his word. He had sworn to love and cherish and defend Adeline until death came between them. And most importantly, he had sworn himself when each of his boys were laid in his arms that he would do anything, dare _anything_ to protect them, at whatever cost.

He had cost them everything.

This had all been for them, to make sure that this country that they would live in long after he was gone was the best one he could make. And it was his Presidency, and his failure to know and guard against some enemy, that had cost him their lives.

So now he made another vow. _I will find you,_ he promised that fleeing shadow. Promised the whisper of humanity lurking in its dead blue gaze, the being that had made the choice to cut a small boy's throat as he lay struggling on the floor. _If it takes the rest of my life. No matter how far you run. No matter what disguise you wear. I will _know_ you when I see you. And I will make you pay._

His oath to protect his family lay in shards at his feet, but to keep this new one, he might break all the others that remained.

He stared across the smooth grass, feeling himself harden into stone and willing it to be steel instead, steel too strong to shatter.

"Mr. President," said the expressionless voice of one of the Secret Servicemen behind him. Coates, that was the one. Weighed down with such guilt and shame that Slade almost forgave him for being alive when his sons were dead. "Mr. President, please come inside."

Slade snorted. "You really think I'm in danger from a sniper right now? With the whole area swarming with law enforcement?"

"You know you might be, sir," said Coates steadily.

And of course he _did_ know, although if there was a sniper he should have fired minutes ago and be legging it like hell right now. The assassin boy had lured him out onto the balcony, after all. It was SOP to have ranged support for a small strike force, if you could, and one man was definitely _small._ An intelligent enemy might be _expected_ to have placed someone with a rifle to cover the boy's extraction. But if they were there, they would have fired by now. And while he did not believe his enemy to be exactly _stupid_, all indications were that he or she was arrogant enough to be almost the same thing.

"But sir," Coates continued, still in that perfectly even, privately miserable voice, "what I meant was that you probably want to be with the First Lady while the doctors operate on Joseph."

Slade's steady breath caught, and he felt the stone around his heart crack against his will. Joey wasn't dead.

_Joey wasn't dead. (_Yet.)

Slowly, slowly he turned from the place his enemy had vanished. Faced the room where Grant's body was being photographed as evidence and the floor washed in his children's blood. Now that he sorted through his memory, he had heard a yowling ambulance pulling up to the far side of the building, and he had not yet heard it go. He swallowed against the fear that was hope. And then, jerkily on his half-healed leg, he _ran._

* * *

_**A/N: **__Whew. __So Nightwing and Deathstroke are rather better fighters than Talon and President Wilson, since this Dick has less motivation to improve and is trained primarily for stealth assassination, and Slade has a desk job. Adeline's badass is taken directly from canon; she's a spy and guerilla combat specialist. (She may or may not be Batman's cousin.) Mirrorverse Slade as President is taken from the Crisis on Two Earths movie, at the request of LordAlforbia. (He is also responsible for the plaid pajamas.) _

_Lots of Deathstroke comics references here, though I tried not to go overboard. Joey is Jericho, age gap with Dick grossly magnified because reasons, and Grant was the original Ravager. I see President Good!Slade Wilson as a sort of latter-day Andrew Jackson, although with 100% less genocide, being as he's designated 'good.' Possibly a sort of Andrew Jackson/Captain America/Nick Fury mashup. :D  
_

_Learned all kind of interesting things about the layout and history of the White House while storyboarding this. There was __**giant controversy**__ over Truman putting in that balcony._

_[Edit: Slight language change to deemphasize Joseph's role as helpless victim. He did good, for a thirteen-year-old outclassed and taken off-guard, but one sentence was phrased badly, thanks anon.]_


	19. De Carabas

'De Carabas'

* * *

The ball glittered. In the privacy of her own mind, Selina liked to toss around outdated words like 'cotillion,' but the meaning of the word _debutante_ had changed since the nineteenth century, or whenever Regency novels were set. They were probably even more annoying now, actually. Not having the excuse of being teenagers. But the ball—in the ballroom of Wayne Manor, on one of the only nights of the year guests were permitted behind the security measures—did glitter, with chandelier and champagne and jewels and a lot of really ugly beaded trim that was apparently fashionable this year for some reason.

She'd bowed to fashion in the cut of her gown, of course, but ignored the swing toward the rococo in favor of fine black silk, accentuated at wrist and throat with diamonds.

She stared vaguely at the emeralds around the fat neck of a red-faced woman whose name she couldn't be bothered to remember, and thought about temptation. It had been years since she'd felt compelled to steal from her fellow guests at these events. She still did, sometimes, but mostly only when she saw something she really wanted for herself. Fencing pretties for a fraction of their value was irritating and unsatisfying. She much preferred working on commission.

That didn't dismiss the itch to take advantage of the fact that she was behind Wayne Manor's security systems. Breaking into this place was the kind of challenge that only idiots took for its own sake, but she was already inside. She could slip upstairs, have a poke around, liberate something small, and be gone long before anyone noticed there'd been a theft. They'd _certainly_ never pin it on her.

It wasn't worth it. She knew that. Though sometimes maintaining Selina Kyle's social calendar by accepting engagements that _didn't _coincide with commissioned work started to seem like a burden. Parties were much more invigorating when she had an ulterior motive for attendance.

Of course, you couldn't slip off and steal from the host when he was walking right toward you.

"Miss Kyle," he greeted, in the deep voice he used to _command_ attention from his listeners. He wasn't a bad public speaker, but Selina was of the opinion he was at his best in a small gathering. He presumably dominated Wayne Industries board meetings sufficiently there might as well not be a board of directors.

She showed her dimple. "Oh, it's Selina, _please_. You've known me for years."

"And I couldn't help but notice that you're not dancing. Not bored, I hope?"

"Never by your party, Bruce. Though my partners…well."

He shook his head, as though gravely disappointed by the quality of men he had managed to acquire as guests, as well he might be, and took her hand from the table beside her champagne flute. "Well, then. May I have this dance?"

Selina replied with a dazzling smile, and made no attempt to reclaim her hand. "But of course. Always a pleasure, Bruce."

They'd danced before; they moved in the same circles, after all, and Selina Kyle was the sort of woman who stayed on the right side of men like Bruce Wayne, at least so long as it cost her nothing. They hadn't had _much_ more than the polite minimum of contact; he was too smart to ever be the kind of mark she played with at length, and too dangerous to cross for fun—besides the resources he could bring to bear in his own right, it was widely known, in the way of unprovable open secrets, that he was involved somehow with the Owl, who had less actual power but also fewer restrictions to contend with. Selina preferred to cultivate clientele rather than enemies, where she could.

They stepped onto the dance floor as a lively waltz sprung up. Both of them, of course, knew the steps perfectly, and he was one of the better partners she'd had tonight. He was very conscious and in control of his own body, making no accidental movements and never losing track of her either. There was something tigerish enough, she reflected as she spun out to the end of their joined hands, about his grace and alertness to set him apart from most of the men here. If he were any less mixed up with dangerous people, she might set her cap at him for an evening, just for the fun of it. Might. He probably wasn't the attentive type unless he wanted something from you.

He showed his tiger's teeth a little as he bent over her, tucked against his chest.

"I'd like to discuss a business proposition," he murmured into her ear.

Selina leaned back just enough to smile up at him, a lazy curl of her lips. "Business, Bruce?"

They broke apart in a brief spin as the music flared, and joined again. "I understood," Selina purred into his ear, letting the hand on his shoulder wander inward, "that you let a certain nocturnal bird of prey handle all that sort of business for you."

"Well," replied the richest man in the world, holding her eyes like a lion, "I thought you deserved a…_personal_ touch, Selina."

Meaning he wanted to make sure she understood he had just as much access to Kyle as Cat, probably, but it was still an expression of confidence in her ability to go uncaptured and keep her mouth shut, meeting with her in person. She held his eyes right back, because one cat she would never be was a lioness, but she smiled, because independence didn't have to be enmity.

The hand at her waist whirled her in a weightless circle, and she knew with satisfaction that they were best dancers on the floor. "You know how to make a lady feel valued, Bruce," she told him, resting her head coquettishly against his shoulder as the steps slowed again.

His smile was such a cold, deadly thing she wondered whether he was even _aware_ that he looked as dangerous as he did gracious. "I have my methods."

And that sounded like a threat even if he didn't mean it to. She bent an eyebrow up at him. "So?" she murmured through a quarter-turn. "Will I be receiving the specifications inside a delivery of fresh Atlantic salmon?"

He smiled again, but without mirth. "If your reputation can absorb the blow, I thought we might retire upstairs and discuss the details over a bottle of wine."

Selina raised her sculpted eyebrows and ran her fingernails over his shoulder. "Why Bruce," she purred, "what _will_ your other guests think?"

_Her_ reputation would suffer no noticeable harm, modern mores being what they were and she not being a blushing virgin, but his might acquire a new stain, if Selina Kyle vanished tonight. It wasn't really necessary—she was not afraid of Bruce Wayne—but she appreciated the courtesy of offering her some insurance. It showed respect. She liked that in a client.

"They will think that one of us is very lucky," he answered, and Selina chuckled.

So long as she never threatened his sense of control, she suspected, he would continue to be a perfect gentleman. If he ever did decide to make unacceptable demands, she had no doubt in her ability to lay him out and pull a quick withdrawal from the premises, but the underworld reprisals might be troublesome and bad for business, so she'd rather not have to.

As the waltz ended, and her partner kept hold of her arm to conduct her toward his table, she wondered what (or who) he wanted retrieved or destroyed that would lead him to bypass his feathered friend's resources and contact her directly.

If Wayne was going behind the Owl's back…well, she didn't think she could turn down being in the middle of _that_. Curiosity was her byword and her curse. But the pay had better be excellent.

* * *

_**A/N: **Yay secret identity hijinks! I so many genre cliches, I not sorry. __Mirroring grey characters is weird. In the end I basically broke Selina's moral compass, as far as who she's willing to hurt and why, and she's also significantly more profit-motivated, which isn't necessarily evil in itself, but it does tend to beget evil choices. A bit less thrill-seeking, too. Basically the same, but this Selina is _never_ going to participate in superhero patrols just 'cause they need extra hands. _


	20. Freebird V: Hell's Heart

Freebird IV: 'Hell's Heart (or High Water)'

_**A/N: **__Nice response last chapter; thanks guys. :] Two questions. 1) Does anybody actually check the chapter summaries in my profile? Just curious. 2) Who's interested in seeing crossovers with the normal DCU? _

_Moving on, new longest chapter! This is for TheRaggleFraggle again, because he is the twisted customer who explicitly asked for it, and I wanted some Jason POV. Can be considered a companion chapter to Red Hood IV: Glasgow. Warning for gratuitous evil.  
_

* * *

"Be still."

For a second he was. The command cut straight past the fog of pain to parts of him that would know that voice until he died. He froze in place where he slumped, wrist hanging loose in its shackle as the flesh along his arm knitted back together, awaiting further orders.

Then he jerked, like an electrocuted corpse, and brought his face up to glower at the man with the knife.

"Like _hell._"

It would be so easy to give in. Cast his eyes down and promise to obey, and do whatever it took to satisfy that implacable voice. He'd done it for two years. It had kept him alive. And the new boy wasn't fully trained yet. There was the possibility he could be Talon again, even now, and go back to buying his own life with other people's. Owls had two feet, right? Right.

He showed his teeth. "How about you cut my face up a little now, old man?"

His voice was thin and cracked, of course, and barely carried across the small featureless room, because in the effort to replace all that lost blood his body had used up all the water he had, leaving less than none to wet his throat. But he didn't let that matter. He _used _it. "How about it?" he croaked, splitting his lower lip with the stretch of his not-a-smile. He was a ghost, a crow—anything but a weak, breakable child. The one benefit to this thirst was knowing he didn't have to worry about crying anymore; he couldn't if he wanted to. "Carve a jack-o-lantern, Brucie? I never got to do that as a kid. Did you? You think your mommy and daddy would be happy if they could see—"

Owlman crushed his throat.

The same hand tipped his head back a second later, making sure the cracked larynx was all stretched out so the edges healed together cleanly, and he didn't have time to suffocate—Talon wasn't immortal, they both knew that very well, but he wasn't allowed to die yet.

Jason gasped for air, good rich air full of the stink of blood and pain and clean new concrete, but he wasn't sorry he'd said it. He had a lot of swallowed hate to get through, and it was looking like this might be his last chance.

Three years ago, when they'd first taken him, he'd spat blood into their white-masked faces. Today, he elected not to waste the moisture.

If the Owl did cut his face, it wouldn't scar. A thin white line, at most, if it healed very badly. But he didn't really expect to live to worry about scarring. The _bastard_ had bagged him being stupidly maudlin stupidly alone in Crime Alley, sixteen blocks from the hideout he'd started to recklessly think of as _home, _and when Jason'd come to, strapped down like Frankenstein's monster wherever this was (not the Cave; why not the Cave?) Wayne had barely gone through the motions of coercing him into being a double agent against Jokester's gang, back during the first hour or so.

He'd agreed, of course. Too quick, probably. He wasn't a good enough liar; his counterintelligence training had never gone beyond biting out his tongue. He'd agreed but it was seven months since he'd been Talon. He'd been in the wind much too long for the Owl to ever really trust that he was under his thumb again. Not after he hadn't seen the original defection coming.

This wasn't conditioning. This was _punishment._

It hurt worse than most of his training had, but it felt cleaner. And Jason had stopped caring that much about pain by the end of his first year with the Court.

_Jason_, he said to himself, as his airway cleared and the Owl let his chin go to press something sharp into the palm of his hand, perfectly aimed so it passed between the second and third metacarpal. (And wasn't that the shittiest; hadn't been to school since Mom died but he could list every major bone, organ, and muscle in the human body because sometimes the Owl liked to be able to give _precise instructions._) _Something_ was a knife, he saw, squinting sideways, straight pale steel, very thin. One of his, actually. No. One of _Talon's._

_My name is Jason._

It had taken almost a year to be able to say that to Jokester. He'd had to practice, in his own head, for months.

_My name is Jason Todd_.

It had taken that long to swallow the idea that maybe running away was doable, survivable, if he had outside help. And it'd still been impulsive when he had, that one crystalline moment when he'd realized that, if it was really true, if he could really get out, then it had to be now. He'd done worse things than kill a little girl quick and clean, but not where they could see.

He'd never been good enough, as Talon. Never measured up. He'd tried to point out, once, that the other guy hadn't brought in any hero heads, either. _That_ had taken most of a day to really heal up from.

Red Hood had almost as much history behind it as Talon, as names went, but it was all over the place, not tidy and all-in-a-row, so he'd just figured as long as J wasn't complaining about his legacy, he was probably okay. Harley had wanted to help him come up with his very own personal name, something that was just his, but he had one already, had his actual _name_ back, and he didn't especially _want_ the work of establishing a whole new street rep. Jokester's hand-me-down had suited him just fine.

Being trusted with it. They didn't even watch him, anymore. He could have killed them all, if he'd wanted, and he knew it showed how sick he was that that always gave him a warm, safe feeling, but it did. Even the ones who didn't really like him. They believed he wasn't Talon anymore.

He shouldn't think about it. Not now that he was never going back. Not that bunch of stupid idiots camped out in the slums, trying to fix things that were too broken to even find all the pieces. Not being asked what pizza topping he wanted, not little Ella with her missing front tooth—_No. _Especially not that. He had to forget she existed, so he could be sure he didn't slip up. She was going to be upset enough he wasn't around to cadge piggyback rides and extra dessert from, without putting her life in danger on his way out.

Morgue-chilly air blew across the bare skin where his shirt (not _his_, though; that had disappeared while he was unconscious) had been sliced apart, breaking into his thoughts as he tried not to shiver. It wasn't so much pride as—shivering _hurt. _Shook his recently-knitted bones and sliced and pried the hole through his hand wider with every little back-and-forth.

In silence, Owlman carefully pinned his other hand to the table, with a matching dagger. He'd been kind of surprised, when he first woke up in the clean concrete smell, that the surface he was strapped to was padded instead of cold metal; it had made sense when he realized it was a _dissection_ table. All the little pins. Like Bruce wanted to figure out what was going on inside him and opted for the direct route. Take him apart and put him back together. Today, Talon. Tomorrow, the world.

"You aren't talking," the Owl observed, in that rumble of a voice that Jason wished he could learn not to be afraid of.

He coughed up some dried blood and tested the state of his voice—as rough as Wayne's, between thirst and injury, though still not as deep. "Guess you showed me." He said it as snide as he could, trying to mimic Jokester's little skipping sneer that could make anything he said sound like a bad joke.

Not that all J's jokes were bad, or anything.

The Owl ground his teeth. Not the way only Jokester could make him do, that had actually cracked a molar once, but probably more frustration than he wanted to admit, and then _there was a knife in Jason's stomach_ _**again**_ and he couldn't help it, he jerked in his bonds, arched his back and _god his hands_. God. He had a high pain tolerance. He was proud of it. But even he had limits.

He knew he'd keened like a dying hawk when the tip of the blade nicked his spine. He tried not to let himself tremble.

Somewhere outside his head, Owlman's voice said, "I broke you once already."

Jason swallowed, with a clicking sound, and breathed through the pain, even as filling his lungs pressed new tissues against the sharp edge of the blade. He could take this. There'd always been a balance, in his training, between teaching him to ignore pain so that he was unstoppable and teaching him to fear it so he'd never stray, but while torture happened in your body _pain happened in your mind, _and his mind belonged to him.

One of the first things that kind of training taught a person, he could have told the Owl if he'd been inclined, was to pretend any flaws in it didn't exist, because all they meant was more suffering as they were ironed out. Fear meant you broke _yourself _before they could finish breaking you_. _It looked the same as perfect conditioning from the outside, that desperation not to give the teacher any reason to think you needed another lesson, but secretly…secretly….

The blade was jerked out of his gut as fast as it had gone in, in a seep of digestive acids and gore, and Jason clenched his teeth and didn't scream and tried not to wreck his hands any worse. Hurting him wouldn't give the Owl what he wanted. Not really. Not as long as Jason could die as himself.

It had come really close to working, though. The Court's teaching method. Same as it did on the younger kids they usually took. He'd almost forgotten how to be anything but Talon. Known better than to think rebellious thoughts. Been _proud_ of what he was. Enjoyed the power he was allowed to have within their fucked-up hierarchy. Even gotten to like the sight and smell of blood, so long as it wasn't his.

In a way, he was glad it was ending like this. Before everybody with Jokester's little circus figured that out, before they understood that he was never going to be good, wasn't fit to be one of them, and he wound up alone. (It was hard to survive on the street, alone. Easier for what he was now than the kid he'd been then, but he wasn't sure it was _worth_ surviving, if you were going to be alone anyway.)

Mostly he wasn't glad at all, he was _pissed_, and he'd have done almost anything for a little more life. Anything but walk back into that trap.

(If he'd really thought Wayne would take him back, maybe he'd have given in. He knew it, and he hated it, hated it even more than the monster inside his skin, than the fact that he would always be a killer and even J wouldn't accept him if he ever saw all the way through him. Almost as much as he hated the man bending over him now.)

"Just…one question," he said, through his aching throat, once the wound in his stomach had begun to seal, and as he did the blade that had been sinking toward him hovered still over his collarbone. He wasn't sure why, but the Owl had a weakness for questions. The petition aspect, maybe. The idea that if you were asking, there was something he knew that you needed. He sometimes answered, and he almost always let people ask. And there actually was something Jason wanted to die knowing. He fixed his eyes on the bare part of the Owl's face, ready to read the smallest twitch of expression. "Drake," he whispered. "Is he yours?"

Because if that rumor was true, then Jason didn't have to feel bad anymore, because even Wayne wouldn't do this to his own kid. He'd never seen the man have any contact with Janet Drake, but he hadn't been around eleven years ago, and the Owl wasn't a monk. It was _possible_.

"He will never be stupid enough to betray me the way you have," the Owl replied, voice pitched so low and dry it made Jason's aching bones _buzz_, and that was probably a _no _because he hadn't even understood the question, but only probably, which meant he still didn't know, not for sure, and he just wanted to be _sure_, before he died, whether his replacement was one of the debts he was hauling into the dark. He couldn't even laugh at the delusion in _betray_.

His tongue ran sandpaper-rough over the roof of his mouth as he tried to find a better comeback than _Fuck you,_ but before he managed anything, a third party broke into the conversation.

Out of nowhere, the bare concrete wall to his left shattered with the particular rolling _boom_ Jason knew as tannerite, and to his surprise golden sunlight filtered in, followed closely by a wave of warmth. Had it only been a few hours since he'd been taken, or was it already tomorrow?

A female voice cried, "_Get away from my son!_" and Jason knew the torture must be getting to him more than he'd realized, because he _knew_ his mom was dead. He'd sat by her body for hours. She had been so, so cold and it had been so long ago. And he still turned his face toward the broken wall expecting Catherine Todd.

The woman was a silhouette against dusty sunbeams, one arm drawn back, and his mom had _never_ worn a hat like that.

"Stand back," she ordered, and took a step forward, resolving into more than a black outline. Harlequin, in full motley, bells and all.

"Ms. Quinzel," said the Owl, unruffled by his exploded wall. Bastard. "Do you have an appointment?"

"No." Harley reached over her shoulder and unholstered…some kind of gun. Big. The barrel was long and wide and she trained it on Owlman with calm deliberation. "Get away from my son, _Mr. Wayne_."

Jason seriously considered the possibility that he was hallucinating. Which would be embarrassing, because he was almost sixteen and hadn't been a kid for a long time, and Harley wasn't his _mom_, f'chrissake. She had her own kid. She hadn't even known him a year. Well, she had if you counted all that time he'd spent trying to kill her, but he'd only sort of been _Jason_ then.

The claws on the Owl's glove sank into his ribs. Oh, shit. Guns and Bruce Wayne. Bad combination. Jason had once had to take a man's arms off at the fingers, wrists, elbows, and shoulders in that order, after he'd had the nerve to point a firearm at Owlman. His heart lurched.

"Hrly," he said. Coughed a little, hoping to clear his throat enough to talk. She shouldn't be here. When he'd thought he'd do anything for a little more life, he sure as hell hadn't meant he'd trade hers. Maybe this was what he got for praying when he'd long ago decided that if there was a God, his main defining characteristic was a sick sense of humor.

"It's okay, Jason," she said, not taking her eyes off the Owl. Before he could get out any disagreement, something lunged up through the smoke and dust of the bomb site, and mighty jaws closed on Harley's right shoulder, and she was dragged away from the gap with a shout, out of sight.

The _dogs._ The fucking mutant dogs; he knew those dogs, he used to be almost the only one who could _feed_ those dogs without getting bitten.

Jason felt the tearing of the blades in his palms, and then an inch or so later, of the edges of the shackles cutting into his wrists, but only at a distance; it hurt, technically, but not nearly enough to _matter_—if he could get free, he didn't care if it meant cutting his hands _off_. He could _kick_ the dogs. He was good at kicking.

Harley couldn't die trying to save him. He was _done_ being a curse, dammit, done surviving at the cost of other people.

"Why are you fighting?"

It was the contempt that did it, the contempt and the horrible _gentleness_ of the hand on his forehead, brushing blood-stiff hair back. He threw himself back against the table, flinging his chin up hard and fast, his teeth clacking together a fraction of an inch from Owlman's fingers. Not that it would have mattered if he'd made it; the gauntlet was too thick to bite through. It got his message across, though, and bought him another second to buck and heave at the restraints—the ones at his ankles, this time; it wasn't like he was getting back the manual dexterity for anything as delicate as lockpicking anytime soon enough to be useful, anyway, so it didn't make any difference.

"Why have you ever tried to fight me?" the Owl asked, and it was like he really wanted to know, like he really didn't _get_ it. Why people would hate him and what he stood for enough to beat themselves bloody against him and come back for more.

Maybe, if he was capable of understanding that, he wouldn't _be_ Owlman.

Jason snarled the same note as the dogs outside, and jerked. He was beyond pain, now. He didn't even feel it. But the knife on the right felt a little bit loose.

The heavy hand brushed down the side of his face, around the knot at the hinge of his jaw, and settled on the side of his throat, over his jugular. The claws on Owlman's black gloves weren't nearly as sharp as the ones on Talon's red—he found that inconvenient when handling delicate equipment—but they were plenty sufficient to cut into a major blood vessel. If Jason had had any attention or emotion to spare, he might have laughed at the thought that Wayne expected him to _care._

They pressed, and there was something stupid and animal in him that was frightened, even though most of his attention was on the snarling, cracking, ripping sounds outside, and the King of Owls leaned over him a little as he killed him one more time, slowly, accentuating his certainty that he'd have the freedom to do this again and again, as many times as it took. "Did you think there was any other way this could end?"

He wasn't going to let him wake up from this one, Jason realized. He was going to bleed him until he blacked out, listening to Harley getting eaten, and then burn him to ashes, or whatever you did to make sure a Talon stayed down.

Why'd she have to come? Now he couldn't even say _at least I was free for a while,_ because it wasn't worth it anymore if it meant Harley got killed. Fuck, why'd she have to come _alone?_

These were shitty last thoughts, Jason reflected, but he probably deserved that, too.

Then long green limbs had shoved their way across his vision, and there was a white fist managing to sock the Owl perfectly in the jaw, driving him away from the table where Jason lay, and he would have cheered normally but now it was just furious mumbling of, "Not _me,_ hlp _Hrly._"

"She's handling herself!" Jokester laughed, and it was a real laugh, but then he cut his eyes at Jason, taking in his condition, and the laugh went black and shrill, and J launched himself after the Owl with the kind of mad, hungry rage that made some people afraid of him.

Jason didn't stop thrashing against his cuffs until Harlequin came bounding back through the gap in the wall with a "Be right there!" for him, and flung herself into the fight raging somewhere off to the right, too far behind his table to see. Someone grunted. Someone got thrown through a door with a crash. He saw a feathered edge of cape flicker in the corner of his vision immediately after that, so the person who'd been thrown was not the Owl, unfortunately, but it flashed away again before his heart could turn over, and a second later he heard the distinctive ring of the Nth-metal end of J's hammer on Owlman's helmet.

"Team Bravo, Team Awesome, Team Ricochet, converge on Point Eggplant!" Jason heard Jokester shouting, possibly into a radio, though with him you never knew. Something thudded against flesh.

He bit through his lower lip with a _crunch-click_ that startled him, and pulled his teeth out again feeling almost embarrassed. The new trickle of blood was sweeter than the old stuff, but it was flowing worryingly slowly. And he couldn't _help._

The fight moved away through the broken door, retreating into unidentifiable thumps and crashes, and all he could do was wait. And twist at the shackles, without much hope, and try to breathe. The smell of summer was slowly creeping over the stink of blood and pain, but the stink was coming from Jason himself, so he could only catch whiffs of the cleaner air, when the wind blew right.

His jugular closed, very slowly. The bitten lip was scabbing. He told himself that Jokester and Harlequin were a very good team. That they had backup coming, and if the dogs had been running loose the Owl probably didn't have more than a few low-level guys on hand. (Maybe that was it, why he'd been brought here where he'd never seen before instead of somewhere at the heart of the Owl's little empire. Maybe making an example of him wasn't worth admitting it had taken this long to hunt him down? Or maybe it was so that, if he'd made an escape attempt, he wouldn't be breaking out of someplace whose security he'd overseen for more than a year. Or maybe…)

It felt like he waited for hours, but he'd been trained to measure time down to the second to give accurate reports, and it was really only four and a half minutes before he heard a distant shout of,

"I think he engaged a self-destruct on his way out, but don't worry, puddin', I've got that! You get Red Hood."

A few seconds later, his field of view was suddenly full of clown. Just J, and he could tell from her voice Harley must be pretty much okay but he still wished he could see for himself.

"Heya, birdboy," said the Jokester, more softly than he'd ever said it to Talon, pulling that fixed grin of concentration he got when he did something really fiddly, which was all the warning Jason had before the thin blade through his left hand was yanked out. He hissed, even though he hardly felt his hands anymore, and he could tell J had done his best to get it out painlessly—waste of time. J flinched harder than he did, with an uncomfortable giggle followed by a very careful pat on the arm. "Gonna be okay, hang on."

"Wh?" Jason croaked, and found to his frustration that he'd been silent long enough for his abused throat to lock up and all the blood in it to cake enough that he couldn't _talk_. He wasn't worried his vocal cords were ruined; he knew what that felt like. Still.

"Whatsat, JJ?" Jokester chirped, easing the second knife out and chucking it into the wall, where it stuck, quivering.

Jason coughed. "Why're y' here?" he managed, in a voice all breath and sharp cracking noises. Shame twisted his guts until it almost overwhelmed the pain of the recent stabbings. Had they noticed he was dressed in the shreds of a Talon uniform? Had Owlman told them he'd promised to betray them in exchange for his life? Had they believed it? It was true, after all.

"Rescuing you. Obviously. Wasn't easy finding this place, I'll tell ya, we almost stormed Wayne Manor to getcha out of the basement, but I got a tip from—"

"_No_,_"_ he broke in, frustrated, especially at the thought of the Circus trying to breach Wayne Manor's defenses—there was no way they'd all have escaped alive, even if they got Computer onboard to pull another miracle hack. And all for nothing, because he'd been here, wherever it was. "Why…y'shouldn't've. Come."

J chortled, not happily, and looked up to lock eyes with him as the second wrist shackle snicked open, his eyes all dark and flat and hardly green at all.

"Jason," and he paid attention because J never used his actual name when he had so many stupid nicknames to throw around. "We'll always come."

He drew his freed arms down to cross against his stomach, shook his head. Shouldn't, and wouldn't. It was all no. "Not worth it. Y'll figger it out."

"Long as we're alive, Jaybird, _we will come for you._" Jokester was _angry_, Jason realized, knowing he deserved it for getting himself caught like this, and swallowed. His dry throat clicked again, and then suddenly there was something wet against his lips, and he forgot about big important worries in favor of slurping at—lemonade. The acid of it burned at the raw tissue all the way down his throat as it washed away the clotted blood, but he didn't mind, it was a tiny pain and it was _his; _Talon didn't drink crappy bodega generic-brand bottled lemonade, Jason did that. Before and after, Jason did that.

A cool, dry hand, missing its glove, smoothed itself over his forehead and mopped his blood-bristling bangs back as he drank. "Believe me, kiddo," said Jokester, not angry anymore, but then he took the bottle away and for a second Jason couldn't remember who he was supposed to hate.

"I won't let you down again," said the voice of the man standing over him, so low and serious he almost didn't sound like himself, not helping the confusion, but the Jokester's voice would never be deep enough to confuse with Bruce Wayne's. Jason got his eyes to focus as he slotted the words into place, and swallowed again, more easily now.

He remembered the way the clown's face had gone cool and still, when he learned Jason had originally been taken off the street.

For a second he'd thought they were reconsidering whether he was worth the trouble they'd brought down by taking him, just a no-account street kid not worth rescuing, but of _course_ it wasn't that. This was J's guilty face. His eyes glittered like stones when he was angry at _himself_. You'd have to push him very hard before he'd say it, because he thought going around claiming things made him like the Owl, but so far as he was concerned the street people were _his_.

Never mind that they'd never exchanged more than a few words in passing, a hello or so in the street, one 'you need a hand?' that Jason had brushed off, and one time five years ago he had dropped J a tip; never mind that nobody could watch over every person scrounging to survive in this shitty city. The Owl had taken an orphan out of Crime Alley, and Jokester hadn't even noticed.

And now he'd been taken from under Jokester's protection, and hurt some more.

Jason fumbled for the clown's hand with his numb one. "This is nothin', y' head case," he groused. "I'll heal. You came. Don' let me see you losin' yer smile over me."

This meant he was a liability, he realized. If Jokester would always come for him, he was a weak point to be exploited.

Except Jokester was all weak points; you could draw him out of cover by threatening random civilians. Jason knew. He'd _done_ it. That horrible heroic predictability should have gotten him killed years ago except he always managed to twist and wriggle his way out of and around death.

"You'll just hafta keep giving me reasons to smile, then, Jaybird," the clown chuckled, and pulled his hand—now streaked, Jason saw, with browning blood—free of Jason's to tip his head up and feed him more lemonade. Still on the same rubber-topped table lying in his own gore and all, Jason found himself relaxing so much that he had to fight off a rising swell of sleep.

He wondered if it really was tomorrow. He could go for days without resting if he had to, but then again pain and accelerated healing were both pretty exhausting.

Harley jogged up, her own giant hammer propped over one shoulder, looking slightly gnawed and bruised but generally in one piece. "Come on boys, let's move. I handled the bombs, but we have two minutes, tops, before Gordon's guys are in here."

Jason nodded, took a sharp breath, and rolled his shoulders away from the table. Momentum took him the rest of the way to sitting, and then he held onto his knees and dealt with the bloodloss headrush while his rescuers got his ankles loose.

"Your poor hands," whispered Harley, and he tucked them closer against his chest, trying to hide them.

"I'll heal," he whispered. Raised his head and, carefully, swung his legs to one side. "We need to move."

Owlman had left because of the sound of sirens, Jason was sure. J and Harley were awesome, but Wayne was a monster in combat, and while they could definitely match him together, even beat him, it was hard to imagine them pushing him so hard he was willing to _retreat_, even without witnesses. He more or less owned the GCPD outright, between his two identities, but it was a delicate game of pretended legitimacy, and he _couldn't_ afford outright hard evidence, especially the kind that might find its way to outside agencies before he could have it destroyed. He would have been happy to see Jason and the clowns burn with the place, but it was the sirens he'd retreated from.

Taking out the self-destruct meant there'd be evidence to find, all Jason's puddled blood, maybe even evidence that would point directly to Wayne and not just the Owl. Not that it would mean anything; this was Gotham. That Lieutenant Gordon was on the case just made it worse. Gordon should be a good cop. He _tried _to be a good cop. This meant, in Gotham, he should be fled, dead, fired, or very, very sneaky—J said he was pretty sure he'd caught him being the latter a few times.

But for some reason, Jason had never gotten a kill order on him, and he'd never lost his job. He wasn't _allowed _to quit. Instead, whenever he stepped out of line, he suffered. Demotions and things for minor infractions; worse for major defiance. His son had been killed by Jason's vanished predecessor. His wife had left the family. All he had in the world was his teenage daughter, and his obedience was understood to be the price for her life.

Far as Jason could ever figure, Gordon was like Wayne's pet cop or something, like some people kept pet raccoons—they _could_ be trained, more or less, but you had to keep a constant eye on them, and it was hard to see why anyone bothered.

He'd arrest all three of them, given the chance.

Jason managed to walk out more or less on his own feet, though mostly under J's power, through the hole in the blown exterior wall, into what turned out to be a gorgeous day in one of the featureless gray industrial compounds upriver. A few steps later, though, he dragged to a stop at the sight of the heaps of darker brindled-gray fur that had been vicious, snarling attack dogs.

He glanced at Harley. "Did you kill them?"

She should have, really. They were bred ferocious and trained nasty. He'd watched them shred failures and the disobedient and crunch the bones a few dozen times, some after he got through with them himself, some not.

She looked insulted, though, even as she chivvied him and Jokester back into motion. "Of course not! It's just Jon's knockout stuff. You know," she added, as they picked their way along the wall, across the concrete, around the slumbering brindled forms, "I think they're part hyena? The jaws on 'em—that one there bit my bazooka in half!"

"They prob'ly are," he agreed, making an extra effort to lift his left foot over a tail rather than risk shuffling across it and waking its owner. "I'm pretty sure he had them engineered special." The things didn't laugh, though. They didn't even bark.

Harlequin hummed thoughtful agreement, checking around the corner of the building before motioning the all-clear. "Too bad we can't afford to feed them, huh Mister J? Hyena hounds, that's thematic."

Jokester huffed out an agreeing sort of laugh, but Jason frowned. "You couldn't anyway," he told her, knowing the authority in his tone suffered from his shuffle and his slur. "They're man-eaters. Killers. Nobody tames a dog that damaged. Next time you get a chance, put 'em down."

Harley shot him the look he'd come to know as her shrink-face, the one that meant she thought he'd just said something psychologically revealing, and he scowled at her, before feeling a pang of guilt through his gut, and looking at the ground instead. He owed her, he couldn't… "That's what you _do_."

"No, sweetheart," Harley answered, as the back fence came into sight, tall and electrified and with a neat hole cut into it. "It's really not."

Jokester tightened his hand around Jason's ribs. "Come on, kiddo. Everybody's been worried sick."

* * *

_**A/N: **__They used tannerite to break the wall 'cuz 1) it's totally legal in the US and therefore easier to acquire without a fuss than most comparably powerful explosives and 2) it's a binary compound, and Harvey was in charge of supplies._

_Edit 9/3: At some point in the rewriting process I accidentally overwrote the fact that Owlman left and pulled the self-destruct mostly because of imminent cops, not because his villainous butt was decisively kicked. Fixed._


	21. Making an Entrance

'Making an Entrance'

_**A/N: **__Man I love hearing from you guys. Jokester-sized grin when the reviews came in, I swear. :D (And you're right, 'Guest' anon, Owlman was in some ways outdoing Joker last chapter, but only because his subject had a sufficiently powerful healing factor that the damage didn't stick. Also he's more patient.)_

_In response to general support, next week instead of updating Cirque de Triomphe I'm going to be posting the first of the crossover sideshows as a separate story, so if you're following through the alert system, know that you won't get a message but there will be new material. Do with that as you will._

* * *

The growl of a huge diesel engine is a very-slightly unusual bass note in the melody of the city's background noise, and some of the more alert heads turned on his way here, even after he mastered all the interesting extra controls and stopped jerking to a halt and running up curbs. Not that many people were around, though, in the hour before dawn, and down here just before the warehouse district starts he doesn't see anyone…which is actually kind of a waste, come to think of it, J reflects as he backs carefully up a one-way street, which barely fits. He had to stick to the big main avenues most of the way here because this is honestly the biggest truck he's ever seen and it probably couldn't take half the corners in the business district, never mind driving the thing into Oldtown.

It's huge, it's purple, it belongs to Wayne Industries, and he had plans the minute he laid eyes on it. Someone's going to notice it's missing in an hour or so, but that'll be much too late to matter. He can't help grinning—all the time now, really, but this time with real feeling.

"Alrighty then. Let the good times roll." J pulls down the brim of his Stetson, throws the engine into drive, and then into a higher gear as he speeds up, and then one higher, and plows into the side of Owlman's main criminal headquarters.

It's all shattering concrete and screaming steel and huzzah seatbelts, and then he's broken through and lets the truck grind to a halt, and cuts the engine. Tries the door, and when it sticks he unbuckles, turns sideways, and kicks it wide open. There was a meeting scheduled here and now, his information said. He thinks it counts as thoroughly crashed.

"Who the devil—?" Owlman demands outside, in the low fierce growl that means he's going to start breaking his own minions soon, if he doesn't get either answers he likes or a viable enemy posthaste. Sometimes the best thing to do when he's like this is sit back and listen, though it's hard not to wince.

Now, though, J swings himself out of the cab and up onto the crumpled hood of the truck where he's surrounded by steam from the dying transmission, compensating for the slight heel on today's boots with a sway and a wave, and a tap to the brim of his hat. "Yoo-hoo! And also _howdy!_"

He's lived for the limelight as long as he can remember. (Not very long, admittedly, but how does that matter?) Right here, right now, he _wants_ to be stared at, he demands it—this is a performance, and what they're seeing is a crazy man dressed up as a cowboy clown, all leather and denim, big hat and tall boots and a wide, fixed grin. (The stares of everyone at home burn now, like a weaker kind of acid, ever since he came out of Doc Thompkins' back room and got the bandages off. He _refuses_ to be ashamed. He is not beaten. He will not live as Owlman's message.) They don't even know it's not makeup.

"Whoever you are," the Owl begins, all menace, and is obviously completely unprepared to be interrupted.

"What, doncha recognize me, pardner?" J breaks in. "After you gave me such a _lovely_ makeover? I'm _hurt!_ Wounded, even." He splays one hand across his chest and stretches his grin a little wider, the puckering scars in his cheeks aching at the stretch, but it's a good ache, a physical-therapy kind of ache. If he doesn't stretch those muscles, the Doc said, they'll heal stiff, and he'll lose facial expressiveness.

Screw that. He's lost enough.

The megalomaniac in the mask narrows his concentration on those scars, for a moment, like a needle, and then presses his lips together.

"Red Hood."

It's not the first time the Owl has said his name incredulously, like he's anticipated the punchline of a terrible joke and can't quite accept the stupidity that joke represents, but it definitely takes top place for sheer disbelief.

"Aw, you _do_ remember!" J capers a little, which is risky on the uncertain surface of buckled steel, and claps his hands together.

"This joker's the Hood?" he hears one of the Owl's men mutter, one Benny Cooper, actually; his mom runs the grocery store on Fourth and Hall. Red Hood broke his collarbone most of a year ago and Mrs. Cooper was very angry about it until she heard he'd caught her boy extorting some other business owners on his boss' behalf. He appreciates the vote of respect for his old identity, though it's not like he ever leashed his sense of humor when he had the red hood up. He chuckles a little, and it comes out sharper than he expects, and goes on longer. He doesn't let it break the scene, and stretches his mocking, aching grin at the man who tried to kill him.

Who _failed_ to kill him, and is going to learn to regret it.

"So you survived," says the Owl. Unruffled. "I assume your dramatic entrance was meant as some sort of message."

"Yup!" He sings it out gaily, as though he hasn't a care in the world, and he knows the Owl-minions around him, Benny included, are too bewildered to move against him without orders. Have maybe even accepted this as a very public demonstration of a private piece of business, which as far as he's concerned it is. "Having trouble figuring it?"

"I may need a translation from lunatic to English."

J throws his head back and laughs. Laughs and laughs and _laughs, _high and wild, so it bounces off the ceiling, laughs the way he's been on the brink of laughing every minute of every day since his breakdown in the back of Leslie's clinic, and no one moves while he does it. He has the stage. He's controlling the scene. This isn't his turf but it's his stage and his show, even though he's surrounded and alone. "Feathers, you're a _riot!_" he says, wiping away a tear as the cackles fall away into chortling. "You honestly think _you're_ sane?" He shakes his head.

The Owl was angry from the start; J put a truck into his building and angry is his default state of being anyway, but now he's _bristling_, and trying hard not to show it because J's so obviously trying to be infuriating. "Are you coming to some kind of point?"

J will say one thing for the feathered jerk—he's easy to keep talking. Not that he ever says that much, but it's like he thinks it's a sign of weakness to be the first one to attack once dialogue has begun. He thinks that a person could probably learn to lead the man around by the nose, if they learned all the signs of weakness he'd always go out of his way to avoid. He snickers. "Yeah, actually."

He moves one hand out of sight for a second and when it comes back it's holding a gun. No one was expecting that; the decorative holster at his side was glaringly empty and he's never used a gun before, and it has shock value even though they mostly carry more dangerous firearms themselves. For a second, everyone's looking at it.

The revolver has one of those super-long barrels nobody makes anymore, probably because rifling technology has improved enough that it's not worth the balance problems in a handgun, and a fancy inlaid grip, and is covered from muzzle to chamber with elegant curls of artful engraving. Owlman's not the _only_ one who can get his hands on wonderful toys.

J lowers the beautiful gun at his enemy's face and notices absently that Owlman seems to swell with more fury at that than at having a semi truck through his wall.

"What I'm sayin' is," he drawls, pulling back the hammer theatrically with his thumb, without making the barrel waver a millimeter, "This town ain't big enough for the both of us."


	22. Outlaws III: Eteocles

Flying Outlaws III: 'Eteocles (Esau)'

**_A/N: _**_Okay, so I am an accidental liar. Deadlines make stuff **so** much less fun to write; I hereby swear off them. Sideshows postponed for massive revision. Rehearsal. For the benefit of Mr. Kite. As you were. In the meantime, have some Outlaws. :] Happy Labour Day and vive le proletariat!  
_

_Actually like the title this time. Mellow Roy is mellow, because he's still high from last time we saw him. Notes on canon at end of chapter, for those who are unfamiliar with the relevant backstories and mind this state of affairs. Please enjoy._

* * *

When Roy made it to the roof, there was no battle to join. Dick was standing out in plain sight, and Kori was hovering, face to face with another flying woman wearing an outfit that seemed to be made mostly of belts. One of them was even around her waist; that one had pockets.

The woman's eyes were pale purple, matching the energy field flickering around her as she hovered, and her hair was darker than their female teammate's, though just as huge, and her skin not nearly as orange, but Roy felt he could say with some certainty that this was another Tamaranean. Intense glowing staredown. There'd been a twitch of the new girl's shoulders when he came into view, so he was pretty sure he'd been seen, but she didn't look away from Starfire, as he moved forward to stand just behind Dick.

"_Kori,_" said the brunette. Sounded sort of fed up, and he wondered what he'd missed.

There were two craters pocking the tar paper, a big one at the top of the west wall, where it looked like something had messily shaved off a chunk of the edge of the roof, and a smaller one just to Dick's right. Crashing noises one and two, check. Three was probably down on the street.

"_Commy,_" answered Kori, with a sort of sarcastic sugary tone and all the sneer in the world.

Roy looked back and forth between them. "Commy?" he repeated. "Are we re-fighting the Cold War? Is it the _space_ Cold War?" _Is it the Naked Space Women Cold War? Because I could go for spectator seats to that._ Whoah, had Kori's planet had a Communist revolution she never mentioned, and that was how she wound up getting sold to Superwoman? Romanoffs had it worse, being shot and melted, but damn.

Weird questions broke up standoffs nine times out of ten, though not always for the better, and the creepy glowing-eye game of chicken finally ended. "My crippled sister," Starfire informed him, tossing her head in scorn. "Komand'r."

Oh. Roy paid his eyes up and down Komand'r. 'Kommi.' She didn't _look_ crippled. Damn fine legs, actually.

"Are these your friends?" she asked, smiling at Dick first and then Roy. (Of _course_. Hanging around ridiculously good-looking people was going to give him a complex, at this rate. Eh. All good. Worry about it some other time, maybe.)

Kori flicked her fingers at them. "Arsenal and Greywing. Not that it's your business. Don't pretend we are close, _big sister_. What do you want?"

Komand'r wavered a little in the air, so her hair fanned out and caught the dying remnants of sunlight, which made it look almost as red as Kori's, and made a wry sort of look. Face. Expression. "I set out intending to free you, but it seems you've taken care of that for yourself, so I guess I'm just here to bring you home."

Kori had been talking about getting home ever since Roy had first met her, years ago, when she was still in chains, but now she just narrowed her eyes. "Why would you do that?"

"You're my little sister, stupid. I'd do anything for you." _Seemed_ honest, but Kori knew her and Roy didn't. He'd wait and see. Komand'r hesitated. "If you're happy here, that's wonderful," she said, a little hastily. "You don't need to return to Tamaran. But I at least want to…invite you to my coronation."

Kori went stiff as a board, and her glow sharpened in a way Roy knew as _very bad news, _even through the drug-induced excellent mood he was currently enjoying_._ He backpedalled several feet. Grayson didn't have the sense to follow.

"_Your what?_"

Komand'r clenched her fists, and ghostly starbolts formed around them before apparently being forced away. "My coronation," she repeated. "I had it deferred, because I couldn't go looking for you if I was Queen, and I couldn't give up on you, but…I'm the heir now. Father's health is very bad, and he's stepping down."

The pink light around Koriand'r continued to grow, even as the sun vanished completely below the horizon. "_You were passed over! _You are _excluded_ from the line of inheritance, Blackfire!"

"I can fly, now," the older princess pointed out, whatever that had to do with anything. "Whatever the Psions did to us, it didn't just give us this mutation," she raised her hand and half-charged another of those dark bolts before letting it go again, which was pretty ballsy with Kori floating right there, furious, with two fully ready starbolts just waiting to fire. "It fixed my energy-conversion problem."

"You have no right," Kori spat. "Taking advantage of my absence—coming here to gloat—"

"It's not…Kori, I really am sorry." The alien folded her hands, and fidgeted slightly. It seemed like she was kind of shy, which was weird; Roy had thought Kori's total lack of any hesitance at all was a Tamaranean thing. "I escaped, after they resold us, and I went home. Things were bad, but I broke Riyand'r out of a Citadel ship where they were holding him, and rallied the army. We punched a pretty sizeable hole in their forces and drove them off, and the current treaty should hold for a while. So I'm not a cripple anymore, and I kind of saved the planet." She cracked a smile. "I'm forgiven for being born on an inauspicious day. I'm actually _popular._"

"So you will take the throne," Kori growled.

Komand'r dipped her head a little.

Kori snapped. Pink energy bolts sliced the air and her voice rose into a shriek of rage. "_You cannot take this from me!_" She flung herself forward in flight almost as fast as the bolts and struck with both fists right after they landed, sending Blackfire spiraling away through the air. "_It's mine! My birthright!_"

Hell. As much as Kori had talked about her birthright, Roy wasn't really surprised. Kommi was maybe not a very good sister if she hadn't expected this, not that Roy was that up on the responsibilities of siblings, even within his own species.

The big sister had recovered from her spin in time to avoid one of those nasty flying kicks to the gut, and she declined to take the opening Kori left by rocketing past her, feetfirst. Noble idiot. "I'm _sorry!_" she repeated, angry now. "If you'd made it home in time to get all the glory, maybe things wouldn't have turned out this way!"

As Kori whirled in the air with a scream that was either wordless or Tamaranean that Roy didn't know, he contemplated the possibility that Komand'r was actually intentionally pissing her baby sis off while playing the nice girl, so she could be self-righteous about the fight. The punch she took to the face a second later made him lower the odds, but then the bolt she'd been charging didn't shred away with the distraction of being punched, or shoot off anywhere, it just stayed crackling around her fist as she drove it into the join of Kori's shoulder, resulting in a purplish exploding punch, which made Kori hiss in fury and sock her in the gut, which Blackfire answered with a pretty serious blow to the ribs. It only got more brutal from there, and Roy was fully prepared to dodge aside if one of the dueling princesses threw a starbolt or her sister in his direction, because he was pretty sure they'd forgotten they had an audience.

He glanced sidelong at his fellow spectator, shifting the quiver on his shoulder. "Think we should help?"

Dick shook his head, not bothering to break up his natural solemn expression with any pointless emoting, and not taking his eyes off the combatants. "Only if she really needs us. This isn't our fight."

Specializing in a support role like sniper, on a team with a flying tank and a ninja, meant Roy had a lot less respect for personal fights than he'd had when he was a teenager, or even than he'd had at twenty-five, but Kori was from a warrior culture so, fine. He didn't especially want to piss her off, and so far Blackfire didn't seem all that dangerous.

Well. As flying Tamaranean warrior princesses went.

He gave a rolling sort of shrug and moved back a bit further so he could lean against the door to the stairwell and watch the fight in comfort. He loved looking at pretty things when he was high—had trouble taking the time to appreciate them otherwise, but they always seemed more...well, more, like this. Kori had shown off for him occasionally before, but this was…this was really awesome. It would be cool even if the combatants weren't gorgeous, even without the bursts of colored light through the deepening twilight, but he hadn't really been kidding earlier, _this_ he could watch all night. Too bad Kori didn't go in for the bare midriff look.

"We don't need to do this, Koriand'r," Blackfire panted eventually, falling back a little from the rapid lightshow of a slugfest, with blood running down her lip.

"Not if you surrender," Starfire retorted, poking measuringly at a contusion in one of her eyebrows that was threatening to become a split.

"Never."

Kori grinned. It was almost more of a smirk, really. All confidence. "When we were training on Okaara, I always beat you."

Her sister didn't smile. "That was a long time ago."

Kori _moved. _Before Roy caught up, the fight had turned into a messy, sickeningly three-dimensional grappling match that ended with Komand'r's left arm pinned to her side and the right twisted over her head in a really painful-looking lock. Kori grinned just behind her sister's right ear. "You may have finally gained flight, you freak, but you haven't mastered it yet." She jerked on the locked joint, and Komand'r grunted in the sharp pain of someone having their shoulder dislocated. Dick winced.

"Maybe we should do something," he admitted.

"Yeah?" Roy asked, raising his eyebrows. "What?"

"Kori," said Blackfire tightly, "I've always loved you."

"And I've always _not cared_."

"Fine." A purple starbolt went off right in Kori's face, and Komand'r headbutted her in the nose an instant later, which gained her enough slack to drive her unpinned elbow into a point in Kori's gut that Roy knew was almost as sensitive as it would be on a human. He whistled a little at the efficient brutality.

Komand'r broke free and fell back, and the sisters contemplated one another for a second or so. "Your style has changed," Kori remarked, which was the nicest thing she'd said since Blackfire arrived, never mind since the coronation bomb had dropped.

"I've been fighting a war," her big sister shrugged.

Roy knew almost nothing about this Citadel crowd, but they were strong enough to seriously threaten a planet of Koris, so he figured they were pretty tough. There weren't many people on that power level on Earth, and a lot of the ones there _were_ had been with the Society, so Kori hadn't fought many of them. She'd also failed to account for the fact that her sister's hands were deadly weapons even when they couldn't move, which was just sloppy.

He wasn't sure how this was going to go.

Roy was on Kori's side, of course, because that was how being a team _worked_, but he also got a vague satisfaction out of seeing Komand'r, who'd apparently spent most of both their lives as the underdog, getting some licks in. If this had been a basketball game, or even a boxing match, he'd have sat back and cheered all good moves from either side, but as Kori scythed her right hand in an attack she'd bastardized off Dick's blade-hand and polished into the cleanest killing blow in her repertoire, he was pretty clear this wasn't a game.

Kori had changed, too, he was sure, since they'd been kids together. He wondered if Blackfire saw it. What she'd say if she saw the scars the Lash of Submission had left on her sister's scrupulously covered back. Though apparently she'd been sold at least once, too, so maybe she'd be another one like Dick that 'got' it better than Roy.

Komand'r kneed Kori in the face and Kori rallied, grabbed two handfuls of her sister's hair, swung her 270 degrees and slammed her full-length into the side of the building, which shook again. Glass cracked and jingled to the ground.

"Try not to bring the place down, huh?" Roy called, suppressing the urge to laugh. His team was the best.

"Mm," Kori grunted, which was as close to an apology as you ever got out of her.

She did keep it further from the building after that, but not so far it spoiled Roy's view.

He'd known there was a reason he liked her.

Komand'r was tough, and she was pretty cold, but the longer Roy watched the more he saw that she didn't have access to the sheer ruthless brutality Kori did. The longer the fight went on, the harder she made Starfire work for every blow she landed, the deeper Kori reached into the ball of rage she'd nursed since long before Roy ever met her. The rage he'd noticed years ago when he'd seen her shredding Superwoman's enemies like paper and _known, _the way he knew the weight of a hand-fletched arrow and the trajectory of a perfect shot, that it wasn't them she hated, they were just all she could reach…

Blackfire hit the roof of the building next door, and didn't get up fast enough. Kori was on her like pink lightning and had her in a better submission hold than the last, Komand'r's explosive hands buried in her own gut, with Kori's arm across her sister's windpipe in a solid chokehold. Her teeth flashed white on orange.

"If you'd do anything for me, then _die!"_ Kori snarled, all triumph, tightening the arm until Blackfire's eyes started to widen in instinctive desperation. Even Tamaranean royalty needed to breathe. "Die, or step aside. Your place is at my feet. You have _always_ been below me!"

"Shit," said Roy, gut twisting. Dick was already moving.

"Kori!" he called out from the very edge of their roof, and her head actually turned slightly, though she didn't let up on the strangulation. "Star, come on. You don't really want to do this."

"I really do."

Dick hesitated. Roy wasn't sure what he'd _expected_ to hear in response to that pretty lame opening line. You could tell he didn't have a lot of experience with the touchy-feely. More carefully he asked, "You hate her that much?"

"She was never worth hating," Kori replied with a shrug, and then her face fell back into a glower. "But thinking she can take what's mine, that's unforgivable."

"Kori," Dick said unhappily. Roy would have just looked like a putz trying the sad eyes, but Grayson's pathetic face actually got Starfire's attention again. "She's your sister."

"Which is why she's in my way."

Dick took that in. Nodded. "So make it fast."

Roy blinked a couple of times. Okay, yes, he was slightly high right now, but he was pretty sure this was not him losing track of the situation. Hairpin turn much?

"What?" said Kori, just as confused and a lot more hostile about it.

Dick bounced slightly on the balls of his feet on the edge of the roof, a sort of full-body shrug, hands curling inward at the wrist in the way they did when he was thinking about killing someone. "Get it over with. If this is about getting her out of the way, not about making her suffer, hurry up and kill her already. Snap her neck, that would work, right?" He did that little cocking bird thing with his head, and Roy couldn't see it but he bet Dick had turned his face on again for a second, to do that creepy little grin with the teeth. A lot like the one Kori wasn't making anymore.

"I…." said the younger princess, but she didn't snap Blackfire's neck.

It was hard to tell exactly where a Tamaranean was looking, because of the solid-color eyes, but Roy was pretty sure they were _both_ staring at Dick now, even if Komand'r was looking close to passing out and had to watch him out of the very far right of her peripheral vision.

"If it's political, there's no reason to draw it out," said Dick, holding Kori's gaze. "You want me to do it?"

"Christ," said Roy, because they were all killers, but there was something so intensely _personal_ about killing your sister, politics or not, that it felt kind of like Dick had just offered to go down on somebody's girl or slide the needle into Roy's vein, and okay his scruples were a little weird, but the point was that even for people like them, there were lines, and Dick had just barreled across one.

"I can do my own killing," Kori snapped, and tightened her arm a little more. Komand'r's feet were doing that spasmodic twitching thing people did when their bodies desperately wanted to kick for air but didn't have the oxygen.

"I respect a princess who can handle her own political assassinations," answered Dick, and damn if Roy could tell whether he was sarcastic.

"I am _not_ like her," Kori growled, aura snapping. "She ached to dominate everything that lived. I just want what is _mine_." 'She' would be Superwoman; the gossip mill had it she'd poisoned her own mother to seize control of the Amazons in time to join the war. Rumor had something similar about that jerk Orin. Roy had _liked_ Queen Atalanta, all two times they'd met. Not that racist, for an Atlantean—and not quite ruthless enough to be royalty.

"So is this normal, on Tamaran?" he asked.

Dick and Kori both jerked their heads around to look at him like they'd forgotten he existed. Probably had, bastards. He jerked his chin toward the weakly thrashing older princess. "You have a long royal tradition of bumping off inconvenient relatives?" The role of assassination in politics was rarely quite as blatant as Dick's last mission as Talon, but everyone knew that a natural death and a position of power had never been easy things to combine. At _least_ a quarter of all Popes ever had probably been murdered. Probably well over half. It was hard to tell, given they were mostly old and almost never abdicated.

"It's not unheard-of," said Starfire, but she didn't lift her head proudly. People who everyone knew had killed their way onto the throne weren't seen in a good light, he was guessing.

"Well, _we're_ not going to tell on you," he shrugged. He'd hidden bodies for his friends before. He was a professional; no big. "How are the space cops on forensics?"

Kori frowned, not angry so much as calculating. She'd never seriously considered the practicalities of getting away with murder on her homeworld, Roy was guessing. Royal privilege. Dick was watching her, some tautness to his face that didn't add up to a complete expression, but at least you could tell he was feeling tension.

Then Blackfire spasmed, a massive twitch in every limb that Roy took for a death-throe in the instant before a massive wave of purple energy blasted from her in every direction.

Roy, half a rooftop away, was thrown back against the door where he'd been leaning earlier, his breath half knocked out of him. His arrows were all trapped between his shoulder and the door so he ignored the bow, snatched out a sidearm and pointed it in Komand'r's direction, more out of principle and instinct than any real intention to shoot. Dick had been blasted off his feet and gone spinning clear over Roy, who was slightly concerned for all of half a second before both Greywing's hands clenched around the top of the stairwell, yanking him to a stop before he was thrown clear off the roof. Good; he was always cranky after he had to heal broken bones.

Kori, at ground zero, had been smashed into the tar paper and lay unmoving for the seconds it took Roy to get his bearings again, and for her sister to struggle unsteadily to her feet, and hesitate, staring down at her until Kori's hand twitched and her eyes flew open, green pools of rage. Komand'r pressed her lips together and refused to look away. Roy had a perfect bead on her head, but even if bullets did her in, Kori probably wouldn't appreciate it. He held his fire.

"It's…_my_ birthright, Koriand'r," she panted. "I was born first. If it could be taken from me, you should have known it could be taken from you."

"Gloating…_bitch!_" Kori growled, and lunged.

Blackfire retreated. The actual belt at her waist came away in Kori's hand, and for a minute she looked ready to wrestle for it. Then she glanced at Roy and Dick, who was probably looming down in the menacing crouch he'd mastered before hitting puberty, and clenched her jaw. "I said I was sorry," she snapped, and then ran for it, going over the edge of the building in what Roy assumed was a controlled drop.

"Coward!" Kori shouted after her. She got to her feet, wobbling, and staggered ferociously to the edge of the roof, but that was as far as she got before a shiny silver oblong that looked an _awful_ lot like a flying saucer blasted up from the ground, past them, and out of sight into the sky.

Roy had no intention of taking anything resembling responsibility for the crater in the street. Just saying.

All three of them stared after the departing vessel blankly for the few seconds it took to vanish among the stars, and then Starfire, once more on her knees, added another crater to the roof with her fist.

"Kori. I'm so sorry," said Dick, as he dropped soundlessly to the roof surface beside Roy. Who thought for a minute he was apologizing either for offering to kill her sister or delaying for her so she didn't pull it off, before twigging that that little ship was probably the best chance Kori was ever going to have to get home, and it had just flown away. (Because Kori went and tried to murder the pilot, admittedly, but Roy didn't totally blame her. She really should work on controlling her temper, though.)

"Uh, yeah," he agreed, stowing his gun even as he kept an eye on her hunched shoulders. "Rotten luck."

Their dangerous lady snorted, climbed to her feet, and ghosted back to their rooftop with a careless burst of flight. Then she grinned, the expression dimly lit by the glow of her own green eyes and eerie, and held up the pouch-studded belt she'd torn free. "But also excellent luck. I find my worthless sister had both a subspace communicator and an interstellar credit authenticator on her, and left them behind when she escaped."

"Too bad she didn't keep the keys to the spaceship in there, too," smirked Roy, speaking from memories of a stint of purse-snatching in his early teens, before Queen had taken an interest. It was also handy in kidnap targets.

"Doesn't matter," Kori brushed it aside. "With this, I can…what's the expression…? Call a cab." Her teeth flashed though the night again. "I'm going _home._"

* * *

**_A/N: _**_So…yeah, Kori's evil. It doesn't show that much when she's around people she likes, but definitely evil.  
_

_Komand'r's disinheritance because of her disability is canon, as are the Psions, the Citadel, and the princess' training under the Warlords of Okaara, but as this Kom didn't try to kill Kori, get herself exiled, and defect to Tamaran's enemies, a lot of the specifics are different. Including no Citadel rescue party for Kom giving the sisters a chance to escape the labs, meaning that instead they both got sold off when the Psions got bored. Starfire's starbolts _are_ in fact a mutation caused by mad science; she's technically a meta as well as an alien. The exploding thing is a canon power she's never used much because it can't be aimed and wipes her out afterward. _

_The Lash of Submission is indeed the evil equivalent of the Lasso of Truth, btw; in designing this world's Superwoman, guidance was taken from the psych theories of the doctor who created Wonder Woman, and he had firm, weird opinions about dominance, submission, gender, and the nature of freedom.  
_


	23. All Over This Land

'All Over This Land'

_**A/N: **__^^ Been a while since I missed more than two weeks on this thing. In my defense, I got the Sideshows started and updated 'All the Roofs of Uncertainty' at long last, so I don't feel remiss. (Updating Sideshow 01 tomorrow, for anybody who likes Jokester and Batman interaction.) For now, quick chapter. Longer one next week.  
_

_Drawing attention to the fact that this is set a few years after 'Glasgow,' which means we are somewhere in the eighties. Which is why typewriter. (Though since it's DC be prepared for schizotech.) I guess the Cold War is on, too? Geez, that just makes things __**too**__ easy for Owlman._

* * *

"Hey, J-man. You've got five letters this week, and _this_." Claude the postal worker heaved a cardboard box up onto the countertop—it was long and flattish, nearly four feet end to end, two across, and one deep, and judging by the way Claude heaved, much heavier at one end than the other.

It was addressed to 'Jokester, Esq.' c/o Gotham Museum of Natural History with the attendant address (occasionally his mail actually made it as far as the museum, where he was generally able to recover it; it was a much better system than handing out whatever his current address happened to be even if he hadn't had an understanding with the post office), and there was an envelope taped securely to the top.

"I'm pretty sure it's not a bomb or anything," said Claude, fidgeting a little. "But…you will open it somewhere else, right?"

J had once (and by once he meant five months ago) opened a letter in the post office that had resulted in everything in the place being dyed blue. People for a week, and paper forever. His fans were weirder than his enemies, sometimes, and both kinds of weird sent him mail.

"Don't worry," he assured Claude, who was probably only a little younger than him (older, if you measured from when his actual memory started, but everybody past _elementary school_ was that so no) but still seemed like a kid somehow, and patted his wrist as he took the letters, before leaning forward to lift his package. "Last thing I want is to get you in trouble, buddy." There were no 'fragile' or '^-THIS SIDE UP-^' stickers to be seen, so he shuffled the box around so the heavy end was propped against his hip, then tucked the letters into the hand supporting it, and gave Claude a grin. "Paula says you should ask Mimi out already," he confided. "She thinks you're cute. And I happen to know she's crazy about forsythia and violets, if you want to make a good impression bouquet-wise."

Claude blushed up to the roots of his hair. "You want to buy some stamps?" he mumbled.

"Ah-heh, not today, thanks. Got my hands full. Catch you next week?"

Claude nodded, his mind already several miles away, almost certainly with Mimi. J cackled under his breath as he let himself out of the post office onto the business of downtown Gotham at nine in an unusually sunny spring morning. He could see the kid fighting not to smile dopily, though the blush wasn't going anywhere.

Win, he thought smugly as he headed home, ducking into Sanjeev's grocery store to get half a dozen eggs and some bread on the way and staying to gossip about Parneet's engagement and the ironic new luxury tax on imported tea and the rumors that another local gang had been eviscerated by Owlman's prepubescent demonling and the remnants conscripted, but more importantly _Parneet was finally engaged_, and he stayed an extra five minutes talking about wedding colors until his mystery package started to be awkward to keep balancing on his hip, to get his good mood back. It worked, though, and he left with a spring in his step, juggling his mail and groceries.

His fingers were itching with curiosity, and it was _really_ hard to keep from plopping the thing down somewhere on the sidewalk on his way home and looking inside, but he waited until he'd climbed the stairs to his attic room and closed the door before he pried the sealed envelope taped to the top and tore it open.

Inside was a single folded piece of paper—nice, heavy stuff, the kind they called _stationery, _though without a letterhead—with a message typewritten across the middle. _Mr. Jokester,_ ran the salutation, hilariously enough—not that he'd never heard that one before, but typed on creamy paper it looked funnier. He wondered whether his mysterious correspondent had used a typewriter out of a sense of propriety, or because he didn't want his handwriting associated with the package.

He shook off his amusement and returned to the letter. It was very brief.

_Mr. Jokester—_

_I've been following your work with some admiration. Consider this a sign of good will._

_ —The Insider_

Jokester gaped.

He'd heard of The Insider before, of course. It was a person or group that for some years now had been increasingly known to slip important information or donations to certain vigilantes, subversives, and other causes that it wasn't good politics to support openly. The Insider's endorsement wasn't any formal kind of recognition, but it was a sign he _was_ making a real splash since he'd started making a big show of his work, and not coming off as just another nut job, either. The vigilante community was an enclosed one, especially at the more publicly accepted end, and this recommendation might go pretty far with guys like Captain Cold and his crew over in Keystone, or Robin Longbow in the Star region.

Assuming it was for real. J dug out the razor blade hidden in his cuff and slit the tape sealing the box. Nothing happened. He flipped the cardboard flaps open and flung himself back against the wall.

Still nothing. Not bothering to feel sheepish when there was no one to see, Jokester sniggered and pushed off the wall with his elbows, before padding back to the table to peer into the depths of his present.

It was…a hammer. Or possibly a mallet. Nearly as long as the box, most of it handle, with a head the size of a small bucket. The surface was bright metal, worked with what looked at first glance like an embossed design but which, examined more closely, were the seams of moving parts.

J reached out and lifted it, carefully, by the middle of the long handle, just below a row of mysterious multicolored buttons, and gave it an experimental swing. The balance was perfect.

In accordance with his basic nature, he then pushed the big red button.

_Crsh! _went the demolished back of the nearest chair, and J let out a startled, delighted yelp. A pair of _boxing gloves on springs, _of all things, had rocketed out of the flats of the mallet-head, destroyed the furniture unfortunate enough to get in their way, and vanished sedately behind their panel again. J laughed again, and spun the thing around the back of his hand like a particularly heavy baton.

Whoever The Insider was, he or she was alright in J's book. This hammer was a perfect quintessence of form, function, and absurdity, and he loved it already.

Plus, there was a slim user's manual lying in the bottom of the box. Trial and error was the most enjoyable way to learn, assuming you survived it, but he appreciated that kind of attention to detail. Showed consideration.

* * *

**_A/N: _**_Three guesses who it's from. I have loved this hammer since I saw Jokester vault over Jason Todd's head and attack the entire Injustice Syndicate with the damn thing and it punched Owlman in the face, as seen above, so it acquired its own backstory. This is an early version without the smiley face. :) If I had not previously established that Jokester is a giant gossip, consider it done.  
_


	24. Climbing Ivy I

Climbing Ivy pt.I

**_A/N:_**_ This one's set during the ten-month time span of _Freebird_, not too long after J made his first overtures to the second Talon, months before he blew up a dock to escape. Oh, they only come up in passing, but Linda Friitawa, Crystal Frost, Lark, and Priscilla Rich are all canon villains. Edna and Amacita are OC Gotham civilians mentioned in an earlier chapter._

* * *

Harley slipped out into the hall, pushing hair out of her face as she shut the door to her and J's current apartment behind her.

"Sprout's asleep?" Pam asked in an undertone.

Nod. "Waylon's still singing. God, I hope the boys don't get bored with childcare anytime soon; they've spoiled her for the amount of energy any one parent has. Well, maybe _some_ moms can handle half an hour of story _and_ forty minutes of lullabyes _every night_, but my voice runs out."

"Mm," said Pam, whose mother had sung her the same three lullabyes every night until she turned seven, and then stopped completely. Harley's mother was still alive, but they never spoke. "They say it takes a village."

Harley and J would do fine without the rest of them, though, if they had to. Especially if they ever pulled out of the mad business of vigilante humor, or socially conscious combat performance art, or whatever they were calling it now, and had more stable schedules. Not that that was likely. Jokester was as likely to voluntarily stop breathing as to turn his back on Gotham, which in turn was about as likely as Harley ever leaving him.

Seeing the little blonde waver, as if she felt she should sweep back into her apartment and interrupt the soothing crocodilian rumbling Waylon called a song, Pam reached over her shoulder to lay her hand against the panel, holding it shut. "You are _not _a bad mother because you let your friends help you. Start thinking like that and you'll smother the girl."

Harley winced, nodded, stepped away from the door. "Right. Of course you're right. God, Pam, I'm so sure I'm going to mess her up. The stats on psychologists' children were bad enough, but this kind of life…" She shook her head. "It was so much simpler when I wasn't responsible for anyone but me."

Pam snorted at the obvious. "This life isn't so bad," she shrugged. "Where is that feckless husband of yours, anyway?"

"Hee. Still closeted with our august visitor. I thought I was going to have to make my excuses so I could go put El down and meet you, but Ra's really only wanted to talk to J, so I just slipped out without saying anything, and now he's _stuck. _Possibly for the rest of the night." She grinned wickedly. "Don't let yourself get sucked into too many lectures after you go off with him, Red."

Pam shrugged. Ra's al Ghul was kind of like a professor emeritus; she'd spent long enough in school one way and another that she'd gotten to almost like listening to old people ramble, as long as they knew things she didn't. It was soothing. But that was for the future. "Movie night," she said firmly, bringing the conversation back to the now. Movies weren't the _only _things they did when they blocked off evenings to kick back together, but they were a good, easy centerpiece, so they'd gotten to be the default. "We staying in or going out?"

"Oh, going out," said Harley, bouncing. She looked so lit up at the idea Pam couldn't be a Grinch and protest, although she'd kind of prefer to stay in her very own comfortably arranged apartment that she might not have for much longer, watch something stupid, eat something unhealthy, and pretend they were teenagers with no responsibilities for an hour or two.

She nodded. "Okay." They moved toward the elderly elevator at the end of the hall, passing her door and Ed's on the way. "Will you—I'll miss move nights," Pam said. "You're sure you'll be okay if I abandon you to the all-boys' club?"

Harley flapped a confident hand. "Hey, there's other girls around. I mean, not in the field with us, and none of them are you, but I'll be fine. There's Meg and Amacita and Jules, and Maewen, and Lark from the Iceberg, and Crystal sometimes, she might even start playing ranged support if we need it after you're gone, and I've got my whole book club. And I have my ongoing training with Doctor Thompkins. Oh, and Priscilla has a Gotham house now, so she'll be around sometimes."

Pam wrinkled her nose a little; she didn't get along as well with Cheetah as Harley did. But they'd had good team-ups when Superwoman and Owlman engaged in cooperative evil scheming, and Priscilla Rich was good company, warm and outgoing, and better at doing girl things than Pam. Also lavishly generous when shopping with friends, which was hard for Pam to accept, but not for Harley.

"_And_ Linda Friitawa invited me to check out her lab. And J and I have coffee with Edna every two weeks."

Pam couldn't help smiling a little at the exhaustive catalogue of Harley's localized female friends, right down to the closest thing she had to a mother-in-law. "Right, I get it. You'll be fine without me."

"So don't worry," Harley nodded, as they reached the end of the hall. "And don't let me hold you back."

"As if," Pam replied, and pushed the call button. "What was that drama I missed when you guys first met up with the League delegation, anyway?"

Harley flapped a hand. "Oh, just some confusion about titles. Ra's wanted to talk to our leader." She snickered. "My big idiot didn't realize he meant him right away. Not like he bosses everybody around in the field, right?"

J issued commands sometimes in thoughtless streams, which had started to really annoy Pam until she noticed that when you _didn't_ do as he said he barely seemed to notice, let alone mind.

"Not as if everybody calls us Jokester's Circus," she agreed wryly.

"Not like everybody and their auntie doesn't come to him for advice." Harley shook her head. "I hope Sir al Ghul realizes there's very little chance J won't tell you and me whatever they're telling him."

Pam shot her little friend a funny look. "You I get," she said. "You two are practically a symbiotic life-form sometimes. Me?"

"Pam. You're family. He's not going to let you walk into the middle of the League of Shadows _without_ anything useful he _could_ tell you."

Fine line, there. J wouldn't give her personal blackmail on Ra's, not if it had been given to him in trust. He _would_ tell her any major secrets of the organization. Probably. If they'd impact her, at least. "I haven't even decided if I'm going."

"I think you should." Harley squeezed her arm. "It could be a wonderful opportunity. And if it doesn't work out, you can always come back."

The elevator at long last clunked to a stop on their floor. "Unless I get killed."

Harley snorted, and used the grip on Pam's forearm to haul her through the open elevator doors. "How could rainforest conservation possibly be more dangerous than working with us? And you'll have a horde of ninjas around as backup, even if the logging companies send assassins or something."

"I can handle assassins," Pam said, as Harley let her go to punch the ground floor button, and they began the usual jerky descent.

"I know. Pam, we're not kicking you out or anything, but I think you should go for it. You've always been meant for bigger things."

Pam bit the inside of her cheek. "Just because I'm the only meta…" Besides Basil, but he was in and out of the city so much she never quite adjusted to his presence before he was gone again.

"It's not that!" Harley's denial was startlingly emphatic. "You're one of us. _Always._ But you deserve more than Robinson Park."

Harlequin always did read people too well.

Because Pam _wanted_ more. She knew every tree in Gotham, the ivy on the older buildings, the holly hedges around City Hall. Knew how to tangle a man's ankles in sidewalk weeds so quickly and casually it would seem to every observer as though he'd just tripped on a crack in the pavement. She knew Robinson Park so well she could feel parts of it clear across Gotham, and some days it was hard to leave it. She still slept there sometimes, curled inside a many-layered cocoon of protective vegetation as she had in the first months after her change. Sometimes she got so sick of city living she wanted to say the hell with humanity and set all the roots she could call up tearing through concrete.

The thought of being back in Brazil, where she'd done most of her field work for her doctorate, and being able to _feel_ the jungle titans now, being able to _protect _them, it pulled at her.

But she wasn't sure she could handle it. Even the young stands of timber you could find out past the suburbs had more depth to them than Gotham's parks, and for all Pam knew the Amazon rainforest would hit her now like one giant jolt, take her under and never let her go. Plants listened to her, but she listened to them, too, and who knew what the Amazon wanted?

Trees were no less selfish than any other living thing, and if they were angry they'd be _justified, _but...lashing out, that wouldn't help. If the rainforest turned into an active enemy, people would kill it far more quickly and completely than they were now, by taking advantage of it and pushing it back to exploit the land it covered. Carpet bombs and herbicides and who knew what. Humans were _good_ at killing things. It wasn't a racial trait Pam was especially proud of, and she didn't really want to pass it on to her plants, though she was sure they'd take to it with enthusiasm. The way things were now, it would only be a survival trait if they went to war with humanity and _won_, and that…she couldn't. She'd lose, for one thing, and on the way she'd hurt so many people, and…she couldn't.

It was safer if she stayed in the city. Better. For everyone.

"We'll say the same kinds of things to Ella when she's old enough to move out," Harley's voice broke in gently, and it took Pam a second to reorient herself, a second in which the elevator gave its final jerk.

"I'm not your daughter." There was an edge in her voice that she didn't try to hold back. The doors slid open.

"But you're family." Harley's eyes were big and blue and sad, and she didn't say out loud that Pam had come to them hurt. Lost. And thinking of herself as a stray, to be patched up and sent on her way, bothered her almost as much as being thought of as a child, so Pam looked away from that not-statement and walked out of the elevator with extremely correct posture.

Faltered, at the woman poised like a panther in one of the shabby lobby chairs, paging through an old _National Geographic _with a studied lack of expression.

Talia al Ghul would not be nearly so disconcerting, Pam had thought several times, if she didn't wear clothes that dripped money. Harley might be able to identify some of the designers, she was better at that kind of thing, but you didn't need to catch the details to grasp what kind of woman Talia was. She wore money and power and the ability to rip your spleen out through your nose behind a brooding silence that always seemed to be looking down on everyone—and not just because she was roughly six feet tall.

Harley's shoulder bumped Pam's bicep as the two of them managed to mill, nearly stationary in the lobby of their own apartment building, and they shared a speaking look that said '_what is she doing here?'_ before meandering unconvincingly to the mailboxes, where Pam fiddled with hers and bent her head over Harley's. "I thought she was in the meeting with J. Or…shopping, or something," she murmured.

Harley snickered a little. "You noticed about the Gucci, too?"

Pam shrugged. "Is that what it is?" Her mailbox came open and was, unsurprisingly, empty. They didn't exactly hand out their address. She closed it again with a click.

"You two make me feel kind of inadequate," Harley confessed in a whisper, with the squinchy-eyed smile and lighthearted voice that showed she was joking but not saying anything untrue. Pam supposed she understood; Ivy had her powers, including the pheromone thing, and _Pam_ had been halfway into her second doctorate and comfortably published in her field when her academic career went sideways, while Talia was a wealthy, statuesque beauty with decades of combat training under her belt.

On the other hand, Harley was Harley. Her knack for reaching people's hearts and her ridiculously healthy marriage were nothing to sniff at, and it wasn't like she was _weak, _or less intelligent than Pam just because she'd been younger when her career derailed_. _And money, well, they didn't have that, but it wasn't really important. Did not impact a person's adequacy.

"You shouldn't," was all Pam said.

Harley dimpled at her. "Thanks."

"Even though you're short."

"Hey!"

"We make you look about six. Baby-face."

"Hey!" Not real offense, and there was a curl of grin there, but she still turned her back and put her nose in the air. Then, tossing her hair as though she'd been challenged, Harley marched across the room toward the ninja heiress, who looked up with a fairly good impression of only just noticing they were there. "Hey," the blonde greeted, the same word in a very different tone. "I guess we're not being great hosts if you're stuck hanging around in the lobby like this. Not that National Geographic isn't riveting, but that's an _old _issue."

"I hadn't read it before," said the dark-haired woman, setting the magazine aside.

"Really, though," said Harley, as Pam joined her, trying to find an appropriate position so she wasn't lurking outside the conversational radius but the two of them weren't boxing Talia in. "I thought you were still upstairs with your father. You shouldn't have been stuck down here; I'm sorry."

Talia shrugged. "My father prefers to conduct much of his business privately," she said, as though it didn't bother her to be left waiting in the hall like a child or a dog. "I did want to speak to you," she added, turning her large dark eyes on Pam, and she stood. "Doctor Eisley. I thought you might have more questions about our invitation."

Pam folded her arms over her stomach and returned the other woman's level gaze with a pensive one. "Legally, you want to hire me. As a botanist with your nonprofit."

Having an actual paying job that matched her credentials was alluring in its own right, she wouldn't deny. On the other hand, her last employers had cut costs on safety equipment and then used that fact to get her out of the way when she started raising questions about where the R&amp;D budget was going, exactly. If she hadn't developed meta powers instead, and torn up the lab in her near-death-experience throes before dragging off like some kind of ivy-encrusted Swamp Thing, she'd be bones under a Waynetech greenhouse. Maybe not even that. Nitric acid had many applications.

"Yes," agreed Talia who, whatever her role in her father's secretive stealth corps, was on paper the Deputy Director of the Leafshadow Foundation, and had demonstrated she knew how to talk the talk. "Your expertise is invaluable. Covertly, we also need your power. Human destruction moves too fast for natural biomes to keep up with; you can reverse that."

Help the forest stand firm. It was a dream she'd had since she was a girl.

But she was afraid.

Not just of losing control, either. The League of Shadows was respected, but _shadowy_. Ra's al Ghul had been an inspiration to _Ghandi, _and already ancient then, but there could be a dark side to it all that would devour her whole, or tear her to pieces trying to give her powers to all their loyalists, or something even worse, and if she went with them she wouldn't have anyone watching her back. She'd gotten used to having people she trusted around, in case. Just…in case.

She tapped her fingers against her elbow, and then decided to be frank. "Listen. Assistant Director. I'm flattered, but you didn't come all the way to Gotham just to recruit me. There's something else going on."

"My father is entirely sincere," Talia stated. Not visibly offended, at least. She sighed. "But yes, in good faith as allies I will confess that we do have secondary business. Bruce Wayne."

Pam raised her eyebrows. "You have business with Wayne?"

"Say rather he _is_ our business." Talia's mouth twisted. "He trained among our Shadows. Years ago, he came to us and swore solemn oaths, spoke of the injustice of the world and its need for fit guardianship. He was brilliant, and talented, and said all the right things, and perhaps my father was beguiled somewhat by the thought of how much more easily some of our goals might be achieved with the aid of a powerful American corporation, once we discovered his true identity." She paused. "We trusted him with far too many of our arts and secrets, and we later learned that he had stolen far more. Father had begun to think, toward the end of his training, that in time Bruce might serve as his successor."

Oh, now. "Aren't you good enough?" Pam demanded. Point against joining the League. She made some allowance for Ra's apparently honestly being five hundred years old, and he _did_ have female agents on the same footing, at least officially, as his male ones, but still. Academia had presented enough glass ceilings to last her a lifetime.

Talia's smile was perhaps the most genuine expression she had shown since she came to Gotham, though the bulk of the emotion was wry. "Perhaps for Father. But not for everyone whose respect the League requires. The thought was that we might lead together. I was…very young, and he is…extraordinarily charming."

Ah. And coming to Gotham must have stirred up a lot of old baggage; Pam knew the look of someone not _quite_ over their ex.

And they had come to Gotham to deal with Bruce Wayne, who had apparently trained as a ninja in the Himalayas. Really, now. Pam folded her arms.

"You think he's the Owl too, don't you?"

Full lips pursed. "If he is not, he has almost certainly shared our secrets with him. We will prove it, if we can. We have assembled evidence—very little we could submit to a court of law, you understand, but sufficient for our certainty—of his misuse of our teachings, in the years after his break with us, as he pursued further training. Wrongful deaths, mostly. We will probably confront him before we leave. It will not be conclusive. It never has been before."

She was hiding something.

"I'm sorry," said Harley. Talia looked as startled as Pam felt—_she_ at least hadn't forgotten Harley was there, but hadn't been prepared for her to break her silence, either. "About Wayne," she continued, striking the balance of sounding kind without sounding pitying Pam had no idea how to do. "Betrayal is just about the worst thing in the world. I hope you can resolve it." The corner of her mouth ticked up. "And not just because resolving the Wayne problem would probably help us out a lot, too."

Talia inclined her head after a moment. "Thank you."

Harley shrugged. "Not at all." She flashed one of the brilliant smiles that everyone always had so much trouble not returning. "Look, enough business for now," she said. "All work and no play makes life not much worth living. Pam and I were planning to take the evening off, anyway; do you want to come along? Have some Gotham City fun?"

"Fun?" Talia repeated, as though perhaps that word had not been included in her English curriculum, though obviously she was perfectly fluent. Possibly she doubted the ability of Gotham to contain anything fun; Pam could respect that.

Harley looked faintly wilted at the rebuff, and Pam huffed. "You have some religious objection to having fun, al Ghul?"

The ninja turned to look down at her, and gave a slow blink accentuated by heavy eyelashes. "I'm a Muslim," she said flatly. "And not even a very good one. What do they teach you in this country, to think fun is counted as forbidden?"

"It's a figure of speech, actually," Harley rallied.

"Sorry," Pam threw out, knowing she didn't sound very. "I forgot some idioms might throw you, since English isn't your first language."

Talia met her eyes, and Pam raised her eyebrows. Was she going to make something of it? She wouldn't really mind if she did; then there would be a clear-cut reason not to leave with the al Ghuls in a week, and also, even more selfishly, if they got into a fight, assuming she didn't wind up maimed she could then have her evening with her best friend _without_ spending the whole time catering to an arrogant stranger. If she _was_ going to be leaving Gotham soon, she wanted to store up all the memories she could of good times with this second family she'd somehow managed to gain.

"C'mon," Harley wheedled. Pam knew the signs; she owed something herself to Harley's tendency to reach out when she saw holes in people's hearts, and between Talia's betrayal of a weak point, with her oblique confession about Wayne, and the puzzled stiffness with which she'd greeted friendly overtures, Harley was probably not going to take no for an answer. "Girl's night out."

"Girls' night," Talia repeated flatly.

"Well, _yeah,_" said Harley, rolling her eyes as if it was obvious. "I haven't gone out with a group of girlfriends since med school, and med school social outings are…." She squinched up her face and wiggled her hand in the air. "Well, let's just say everyone's strung a little tight."

Pam and Talia's eyes met over Harley's head, and amusement curled the corner of the botanist's mouth up at the hint of bewilderment she spotted. Harley seemed to be entirely outside the tall woman's experience, and Pam wondered if Ra's al Ghul had ever let his daughter far enough out of his sight to make friends or be at all normal, or if Harley's energy was just a little much for someone mostly used to ninjas.

She nodded slightly. If going out in a group was important to Harley, and if it was something Talia had never even gotten to do, Pam could live with it. She wasn't sure whether Talia got the message or not, but she felt better about herself after sending it, anyway.

"I would prefer to avoid the cinema," Talia announced at last. "That is where American women usually go on such excursions, is it not?" she added, when Harley and Pam both fixed her with contemplative looks.

"Well, it's one place, but not if you don't want to," Harley shrugged, and then grinned. "Ooh, I know. Let's hit the Amusement Mile, I've got a yen for roller coasters."

"Don't you and J usually go there on dates?" Pam asked delicately.

"We haven't been for a while. Busy-busy-busy, you know." Harley flipped her hair over one shoulder and peered up at their guest. "Have you ever been to an amusement park, Talia?"

"I have been to the circus," Talia volunteered after a moment. The pause and the inanity of it made her seem a little less condescending and a little more shy, and Pam disliked her a little less. "And I rode the London Eye."

"I've always wanted to do that," enthused Harley.

Talia shrugged. "It goes very slowly. I prefer flying."

"Well, not everyone can afford private planes, Miss al-Ghul," Pam put in. She was afraid it came out a bit tarter than she'd wanted, and Harley's hand landed on her forearm, tightening. Seriously, though. Too good for the movies, turning her nose up at tourist attractions other people wanted to visit… "Roller coasters definitely don't go slowly," she added, trying not to sound grudging. "You should definitely try them."

"It'll be fun," said Harley, brushing aside the tension. "Come on, let's gussy up a little before we go. Everybody'll be staring."

Heh. Blonde, brunette, redhead. They probably were going to turn heads, come to think of it. Pam had developed a tendency to dress dowdy in everyday life, so she didn't have to be Ivy all the time—any advantages it gave just made her feel manipulative, and it was _exhausting_; men always assumed a pretty girl looking nice was doing it for them, and took it as an open invitation to flirt and preen and otherwise demand more attention and energy than Pam had to give strangers—but it couldn't hurt to enjoy being a beautiful woman sometimes, right? Especially when you had friends around to bail you out of any social pitfalls.

"Gussy?" repeated Talia, and this time, Pam was pretty sure, she had genuinely never heard the word before.

Maybe this would be fun, after all.

* * *

Talia, despite her ostentatious outfit, was not wearing makeup. She had the gift of some Mediterranean complexions of lashes, lips, and lids that were naturally dark enough not to need artificial accent, and good skin; Pam could see why she didn't bother, especially if her Foundation had to deal with people who had problems taking a woman seriously. But Hurricane Harley had blown into town; she ducked back into her own apartment to grab an armful of 'supplies' as quietly as possible, then bustled the both of them into Pam's front room, which was thankfully tidy except for all the plants, and within ten minutes had gotten Assistant Director Al Ghul to agree to a pink lip gloss that softened the whole look of her face, and then a touch of eyeliner.

Pam, meanwhile, was required to take her braid down and brush out her hair, and then wear her nice green blouse and the fitted jeans. Also eye makeup, because despite the unsettling general enhancement of her looks that had come along with her powers, she still had the general pallor of her Scottish ancestors, which did not come with natural airbrushing. Harley debated her own outfit until Pam took the skirt away, threw the capris at her head, and told her to get dressed already.

Talia's bemusement was just as funny to watch as Pam had hoped, and when they got to the Amusement Mile she moved up to bafflement. Pam challenged her to a shooting game, and lost, but it was win-win because Talia was awarded a fluffy bear. She stared at it. "No, thank you," she said.

"It's your prize," Harley hissed.

"But I don't want it."

"You symbolically shot and killed it," Pam interjected, smiling crookedly. "It's your prey, mighty hunter."

Talia looked downright offended, and shoved the bear back into the game runner's hands. "I don't want it."

She stalked off to investigate a stand selling candied almonds, while the man in the amusement park polo shirt shook his head and hooked the bear onto the wall again, while Pam fought to keep a straight face, and while Harley gave her a look that said _I'm onto you, buddy._

Candied almonds were a success. All three of them liked cinnamon. Harley wanted cotton candy, but Pam pointed out that eating a lot of sweets before going on roller coasters was a recipe for discomfort at best.

So roller coasters happened. Pam didn't hate thrill rides but she didn't love them either, and she tended to clench her jaw when falling or upside-down, weathering the disorientation rather than getting excited about it. The Plunging Falcon sat three across, and Harley took the middle seat and squeezed each of their hands before the big drop. She made Talia throw her hands up in the air on the second drop, because that was an important part of the 'coaster experience, and dropped her head casually on Pam's shoulder with a contented sigh as the ride slowed down. Harley was like that.

She scrambled out as soon as the safety harness disengaged, in a hurry to get to the booth where they tried to sell you photos of yourself looking ridiculous in freefall, vaulting right over Talia to do so. Leaving Pam alone with the woman, whose face split as she watched into a real, startling smile. Her sleek hair was disheveled and her heavy-lidded eyes seemed less supercilious, scrunched up from beneath to make room for the expression, and it didn't vanish when she glanced at Pam. "Can we ride it again?" she asked.

Apparently she'd liked it after all. "We have to get back in line," Pam shrugged, unbuckling and standing up, but not shoving to get past or attempting to replicate Harley's ridiculous exit. "And first, catch up with the Energizer Bunny," she added, wryly, as she followed Talia out of the car.

"Come on, you two!" Harley called over the fence. "What's the holdup? You _have_ to see the photo of us, it's _hilarious!_"

The flash of the automated camera had caught them on the first big drop, their long hair stretching above them in three dramatic ribbons, Harley in the middle with her mouth open in a delighted scream and her hands held high, flanked by Pam and Talia's fixed expressions of grim concentration. "Pam, I love you, but I will never understand your angry coaster face," Harley told her. "But as a _matching pair…!_" She trailed off into laughing at them again. Pam punched her halfheartedly in the shoulder.

Talia snorted, her arms folded as she contemplated the screen. "We look like your bodyguards."

"I feel very safe," Harley assured her. "So. More rides, or candy?"

Harley bought their faces on a mug, because she was ridiculous, and eventually got her cotton candy, after they rode the Falcon again and the other two coasters, and a ridiculous swooping thing that had you lie on your stomach and was supposed to simulate hang-gliding. (Talia said it did not.)

"Talia?" Harley said quietly, drifting to a stop amongst the cluster of food and souvenir shops, as she tugged the last of the crinkly pink menace-to-teeth off its cardboard cone.

"Hm?" asked Talia, who had not been prepared for how easily the stuff melted and gotten distressingly sticky sampling it, and not said much since she'd finished rinsing her hands in overpriced bottled water.

"You seem…sad," Harley ventured. Pam raised her eyebrows. She wouldn't have said the Assistant Director seemed anything but quiet, which seemed to be her natural state. "Is there anything I can do?"

Talia shook her head. "Not…sad, precisely. More…I have never been to anything like this park, before. But this part of it reminds me a little of the street fairs I attended when I was small. My older brother Dusan does not like to go out in public, but he would take me to them. I…have not seen much of my brother since I came of age, and…."

"You miss him," said Pam, surprised again by sympathy. She was an only child herself, but that didn't mean she couldn't respect the bond between siblings. Her aunt had always been there for her mother. Harley worried about her own baby brother on a regular basis.

"I expect to miss him more keenly." Even Pam could see the sadness now. "His life is coming to an end."

"I'm so sorry," said Harley, with her way of making trite phrases sound sincere. "There's no treatment?"

Talia's lips quirked. "For old age? None worth the risk. My brother is ninety-six years old," she elaborated drily, entirely too amused at their momentary confusion. (Maybe she'd noticed Pam's smirking after all.)

Pam opened her mouth and closed it again. It made sense. Of course it did. Talia's father had lived five centuries; why would he have only begun to have children recently? _None worth the risk_. The Demon's Head said that the secret to his long life led only to insanity, wild mutation, and horrible death for most who attempted it, when asked why he did not share. And how would he know that except from experience? How many of his loved ones had he destroyed trying to grant them immortality, before he accepted letting them age to death as the lesser evil?

Harley put her hand on Talia's arm. "You should make time to spend with your brother, when you get home," she advised, very gentle. "I know it's not my place, but I know if my brother were terminally ill, I'd want to get as much time as possible with him before I had to say goodbye."

Talia blinked rapidly, and pressed her hand over Harley's for a second. "I will consider your advice," she said, in a voice only a tiny bit thicker than before. "Now," she continued briskly, pulling her shoulders back, "let us investigate the absurdly large rotating tea set I see on the other side of this fountain."

Pam really couldn't hate her anymore.

As the evening drew to a close, Talia insisted on buying dinner for all three of them at the nicer of the place's two restaurants, which was at the uphill end, overlooking the rest of the park and a large slice of the Gotham skyline. Harley teased both of them about vegetarianism—Talia was and Pam wasn't, although she was choosy about her beef sources because of pasture deforestation—and for dessert they got ice cream bars so they could eat it in the rather nice little garden outside. Also because Talia had never had an ice cream bar before and Harley considered this a travesty.

In about half an hour the garden would start to get crowded because of the eleven o'clock fireworks, but for now they were able to have a very restful stroll among a series of pleasantly healthy grape arbors. Pam identified the cultivar, and continued to expand on the point long after the other two had completely lost interest, much to her own amusement.

She was almost feeling friendly toward Talia now, she realized. Working with her didn't seem that bad anymore. That was probably one of the reasons Harley had set this outing up; she didn't want Pam turning down a good thing just because Talia rubbed her the wrong way. Normally she detested being _managed_, but she never could hold anything against Harley.

She did and didn't want to leave, and maybe she'd only disliked Talia in the first place because it had started to feel like she was being pressured to choose between her and Harlequin, and there could never be any contest. Pam detested being caught in the middle, and life seemed determined to force it on her enough already. Though circumstances aside, Talia genuinely _was_ annoying.

…though if you didn't like Harley _she_ could be annoying, especially when she got high-handed and thought she knew better than you did how you felt. _Especially _when she was right.

But most people did like her. She and Jokester really were an undeniably well-matched couple. Apart from Harley being infinitely better-looking, but Pam wouldn't say that out loud; it wasn't J's fault he'd had his face carved up by a sick whack job and his creepy little minion. (Not that he'd been a looker beforehand, by all accounts.)

The soft _shluff _of ice cream falling to the ground in a lump drew her attention back to her immediate surroundings, and she blinked. Talia had stopped walking, the naked wooden popsicle stick hanging at her side, her gaze fixed steadily on the restaurant window, on something she could see through the window. Ivy followed the look, adrenaline already spiking at the thought of what could have put such a stricken expression in the composed woman's eyes.

The television mounted above the bar inside had begun to display a close-up clip of Bruce Wayne's handsome, smiling face, presumably as part of a news story, and Talia had forgotten everything else, a look of deep, abiding sorrow etched across her face, easy to recognize this time because Pam had had practice. Sorrow and also…yearning.

_Habibi_, her lips formed silently.

A bunch of grapes smacked her in the face.

It took a startled second for Talia and Harley to turn to the culprit, and by the time they did Pam was already speaking. "He _is _very charming, huh?" She stressed the present tense of the verb as though it tasted bad. Talia had given herself away earlier, even if Pam hadn't caught it then.

Harley just looked confused—she hadn't seen, had been looking the other way, hadn't put it together—but the sharp tension in Talia's shoulders, the guilty way her mouth pursed, they said enough. Pam clenched her jaw. Betrayal tightenened in her chest. "You still love him." That was the thing, the secret she'd sensed lurking earlier. This woman believed Bruce Wayne was the black-feathered monster of Gotham's nights, believed he was a murderer and traitor and thief, but she still called him 'Beloved.'

Challenge in the foreigner's squared jaw. "And if I do?"

Black eyes locked with green, and the arbors rustled in the windless night.

* * *

**_A/N: _**_Part two to follow. This got _super_ long, somehow. I like Pam's POV, which is odd because I had the hardest time getting a handle on her. Poison Ivy is typically about 85% fertility/seduction archetypes and 10% the ever-boiling rage of the oppressed; there's not a lot of space left to be a person with the remaining five percent, and her backstory is criminally thin.  
_

_To my amusement, Good Talia turned out distinctly awkward, which I guess makes sense since normal Talia's primary modes of interaction are manipulation and violence. Any resemblance to Damian was unintentional. But probably unavoidable. She kept her established tendency to consistently overdress when not in field gear because it's not actually evil, and it's always made me laugh. _

_Dusan al Ghul is better known as the White Ghost; an albino son of Ra's who was desperately, stupidly loyal and perpetually rejected, right up until he voluntarily became the man's replacement body. I'm assuming that Good!Ra's is a significantly better parent, but still gave his boy an adequacy complex, because good people can still fuck up spectacularly, especially at something like parenting._


	25. Hey, Brother

'Hey, Brother'

**_A/N:_**_ Ack. Sorry, folks. I'm back. October was a dirty rotten no-writing-accomplished month; good riddance to it. Since I still have writer's block on the ending of the chapter I _intended_ to post over a month ago, please enjoy a brief slice-of-life. Updates should resume normally. ^^  
_

* * *

"…Leila's being a bitch, but at least she's not trying to convince Dairine I'm the devil, like Kayla is with Micah."

Harley tucked the phone between her shoulder and her ear as she navigated her way up a narrow hallway loaded down with a heaping basket of clean laundry, and repressed a sigh. Her baby bro had been gloomier than usual ever since Jaleila had left him and taken their daughter, but today had been a real jeremiad even by his standards. "Barry," she said, "it seems like all your serious girlfriends are like some horrible combination of Mom and Dad's worst traits. It's not your fault they hurt you, but _please_ choose somebody nice next time?"

"It's not like I date bitches on purpose, Harl," he answered sulkily, and now Harley did sigh as she set down the laundry on her bed.

"I know, Bear-Bear." It was an unconscious thing; she knew how this pattern went. "You deserve better, is all."

"Right. Well, _duh._"

She left it there. Lecturing wouldn't help. "Yeah, duh. You should move, you know." He still lived in the same small city near the border of New Jersey and Pennsylvania where they'd grown up, within walking distance of their childhood home, and it couldn't be good for him.

Barry snorted. "Where would I move to?"

"I don't know. Somewhere you like. Somewhere not near Mom. New England, maybe." As a kid, her little brother had always loved snow.

"Because that worked out so well for you," he said caustically.

Harley tossed both her hair and a pillowcase as she sorted the load into hers, Ella's, and linens. "Pretty well, yeah."

"You're a nationally wanted fugitive. _With huge student loans._"

Harley laughed at that; not that it wasn't an actual extra problem in her life but he wouldn't have added it like that if he was really trying to hurt her. "But I'm happily married."

"That's not necessarily a life goal, you know."

Harley chuckled and started wrestling with folding a queen-sized top sheet. J had it easy, with his long arms; he could just tuck the middle under his chin and _voila_, but she was proudly tiny, and it had its burdens. "Yes, I know, but you're just as much of a romantic as me at heart, as justifiably bitter as you're getting. You just need to believe that you deserve somebody who really cares about you." When Barry didn't argue with that, she folded the sheet into quarters and concluded, "Which is why you should get away from Mom."

"If I leave the state I lose visitation rights, Harl," Barry said flatly, and Harley winced. Of course. Of course his kids were way more important than any possibility of any other kind of happiness.

"I'm sorry, Teddy Bear," she apologized, ignoring the laundry for a second to focus on projecting maximum sincerity. "I forgot."

"Yeah, well," Barry grumbled, but she knew she was forgiven. "Speaking of which, why have I still not met my niece yet?"

"Because we don't want certain people to know she exists? Come up to visit for a weekend and you can have all the time you want with her."

"Come down for a weekend and we can get all three of them together," was Barry's counter-offer.

Harley paused again, the neckline of a sweater tucked under her chin before she creased the sleeves and stacked the folded garment to one side. "It would be nice if Ella could meet her cousins," she admitted. "She's five now, she might actually remember it. Just…"

"Just?" her little brother prompted.

"If J comes. He's going to want to go see Mom."

The line was silent for a second. Sharon Quinzel hadn't been invited to Harley's wedding, because she'd known perfectly well that if she gave her mother a time and place where she could be assured the lunatic her daughter had run off with would be, that place would have been hit with cops like a bolt from above. It was actually one of the more _reasonable _causes her mother had ever had to make her life difficult, and Harley hadn't really resented the situation. Just hadn't invited her. She _had_ tried to reconnect, mostly because J wanted to meet her mom, but Sharon had refused all contact.

Her slamming the door in their faces if they tried to visit was the _good_ outcome. J wouldn't insist Harley join in the visit, of course, but he _would_ head over on his own if she declined. At least Dad was dead, so they wouldn't come to blows, but…

"He has this thing about families," she tried to explain. He _knew_ plenty of families were only good for escaping, knew more about Harley's parents than she'd willingly told anyone else, but as long as she considered Sharon family—and she did, she couldn't help it—he did, too, and he wanted to meet her. Or maybe it was just because meeting her mother would tell him a little more about _her_. She didn't _think_ he was planning to give the woman a piece of his mind; he would have said something.

"So don't bring him," said Barry, with an audible shrug. "I mean, there are definitely worse brothers-in-law I could've had, but he's not mandatory for all family time, right? And he's too conspicuous, anyway."

"That works," Harley admitted. "Okay. Tell me your visitation schedule, and I'll see what weekend you've got both of them I can get away."

"Packed calendar?" drawled Barry, who had teased her for years about the workload of a college and then a medical student, and then an intern, and then the heavy caseload she'd taken as a junior staff psychiatrist, and thought it was hilarious that she was now, after all that, 'self-employed.'

"Yeah," Harley agreed. A bang and a shout echoed from the other end of the house, showing that 'practice' with the new no-heat flash-bangs was still underway. She could just make out Pam's victorious laughter; guess she'd gotten Ed back for the explosion at breakfast. At this rate they were either going to give each other all heart attacks or be completely ready to use the things in combat by the end of the month.

Harley folded the last pillowcase and dug into her own stash of chemical pellets, trying to decide if it was too mean to trap the linen cabinet. Knowing her brother would hear the grin in her voice. "Like you would not _believe_."

* * *

**_A/N:_** _So it's not exactly formal canon anywhere I'm aware of that Harley Quinn had abusive parents, but look at her. She is TEXTBOOK. _

_I'd say parents hated each other but pretended otherwise, Mom ran the kids' sense of self-worth down at every opportunity, Dad had anger issues, and Harley in the middle taking responsibility for being perfect enough to hold the family together and protect her brother, and blaming herself because kids usually do, even without the kind of mom who forces it on them. This Harley has confronted her issues better, mostly. Also, supportive environment! Yay! _

_Eh, Happy Guy Fawkes'? :] I feel like I should have had my guys blow up a building today. Something significantly eviler than Parliament, though. With no people inside.  
_


	26. Outlaws IV: Homo Sacer

Flying Outlaws IV: 'Homo Sacer (Homini Lupus)'

**_A/N:_**_ This title, I like. The Navajo Nation, being mainly desert, isn't really noted for forest fires, but that is the canonical death of Ranger Roy Harper, Sr. I find 'Brave Bow' an awkward name in English and Navajo grammar kicks my ass every time (adjectives are verbs!), so Roy uses his foster father's other canon name, Raymond Begay._

_The thing Roy doesn't know the name of is a Brillo pad._

* * *

Kori declares the alien cell phone will get better reception with less gaseous interference in the way, or something like that, and shoots off into the stratosphere. Dick and Roy stand around for a while, Roy sort of looking at the stars as the last trace of pink fades in the west and not thinking about anything, which is easier to do when he's high, and Dick switching between looking up at the sky and over the edge of the roof, until he finally gets bored or chilly or something, makes a little huffing sound, and heads back into the stairwell.

Things in his life tend to begin and end on rooftops, Roy thinks, as he drifts after Dick for lack of a better idea. His father put him on the roof to keep him above the smoke, when he went off to fight forest fires and burned to death. Oliver Queen first found him skulking on a roof when he was fourteen, that first autumn after Raymond died and the Nation tried to stick him in the foster system. And last year he was stuck in his sniper's nest on a roof a block away, out of ammo, when the vigilante called Lady Shiva sliced Queen's head off. He should just stay off roofs.

He likes them, though. He wouldn't be Arsenal, wouldn't even be Roy Harper, if he didn't gravitate to a good vantage point.

Down on the fourth floor again, still without meeting any neighbors in the stairwell either because neighbors in this dump are mythical or because people around here know better than to get in the way of a super-brawl, Dick runs some more water into the pot Kori ruined trying to make mac 'n' cheese the other night, and starts scouring it, furiously, with a whole palmful of dish soap and one of those green scrubby things, like evil plastic moss, that might have an actual name, but if so Roy doesn't know it.

It doesn't seem weird for a second, and then it seems like _the weirdest thing anyone has ever done_, and Roy stares at his teammate's tense shoulders for a second. Maybe a lot of seconds.

Something clicks, and he swears, which earns him Dick's attention.

"What?" He glances at Roy, then back at the pot, then abruptly looks disgusted and washes his hands of the mess, literally.

"You son of a bitch," Roy marvels.

Dick dries his hands and gives Roy what's probably supposed to look like his full attention.

"The milk," Roy says viciously.

Grayson blinks. "Sorry?" He gives a concerned little squint and Roy wants to bash his stupid face in because he has no right to emote so well when every single thing about him is so fake.

"The milk, and the pans, and—" Roy stops, because there are a dozen solid details like that he could list and a few dozen more that slide around the edges of consciousness refusing to be pinned down, little things Dick's said and done over the months. "You've been _nesting_."

"I don't…"

"Yes, you do. You want to settle down, is that it? Park us here till the end of time? Maybe get a fucking nine to five while you're at it? What the hell." Roy feels used, and he couldn't even have said how, exactly, but it's deep-down. Even through the dopamine rush he hasn't yet burned through, it makes him sick and angry.

Dick isn't looking at him. Or making any expression, but that's normal, right up until he laughs. It's that same cracked little sound he made that first night on a roof in Detroit, and Roy wonders if every other laugh he's ever heard from the guy was a pretense.

"Nesting, huh? Maybe. But I don't want to stay here, no. Kolkata, Prague, Dubhlin; so long as it isn't Gotham, I don't care."

He turns further away, to the counter where he piled up the fresh fruit less than an hour ago, shrugs, flicks one of the shiny red apples into the air, and impales it before it can fall, with one sharp dart of a knife that more or less appeared in his hand. If Roy watches carefully, he can usually spot it slipping from his sleeve, but most people wouldn't have a prayer. Dick crunches into the transfixed apple. "I'm gypsy blood, Harper. Home isn't a place."

"So what you're saying is you don't want us to _leeeave_ you." It was unnecessarily shitty of him to draw out the 'leave' in a whine like that, but he doesn't care. He'd like to split his knuckles on the guy's teeth, but the only combat area where Roy is the unquestioned superior of the two of them is at range.

He thinks he's about as good at most things, bar stealth and maneuver, especially armed, knows he carries more muscle, but that goddamn healing factor is a problem, means Dick can afford to take hits that Roy can't. He's faster, too. It wouldn't be a smart fight. He's not sure he cares. He's not sure how much of that is the heroin talking.

"More like if we're going to be a team, I've wanted it to be with a minimum of biting off of heads." Dick shrugs, still expressionlessly eating the apple off the dagger.

He tugs the speared fruit free with his teeth suddenly, a motion with no overt anger or savagery that's still somehow threatening with its animal artlessness, holds it in his mouth and puts the little double-edged dagger down on the counter with a sharp _tap,_ moving as though this is a gesture that says something, like he expects Roy to speak his silent language.

They're not the same. Roy's killed people because they wanted to kill him, or they were an obstacle, or sometimes just because Oliver wanted them killed, but even then it was as a favor to the man, every time. He's killed in battle and murdered individuals for various forms of profit, but he's never lived death the way Talon did, the way it seems Grayson still does under his careful, minimally confrontational tactics.

Dick reaches up and takes the apple in his hand, leaving behind the bite that his teeth already scissored away. Chews at it with calm deliberation. _Crunch, crunch…crunch._

Roy wonders again if Grayson knows he was scared to death of Talon when he was seventeen.

"I looked you up, you know."

Grayson's head shoots up at that, but it must have been involuntary because he doesn't ask anything, or turn around. "Owlman didn't bother to erase you, it turns out, I guess because nobody cared that you were gone. Richard Grayson, of the _Flying Graysons_. Child acrobat." He shakes his head. Cute little family of three, and from the look of things the mom and dad had loved their blue-eyed boy enough to make Roy effing _sick_. And he still hadn't put it together until now. "I can't believe I bought your act for so long. You're not helping us. You're _using_ us."

He was always a risk to have around. The new government might not care much about old news like the Wilson assassination in the wake of the War, and Owlman might not have the resources anymore to offer a worthwhile bounty, but there's always been the chance of Wilson or Wayne crashing through the window to pursue personal vendettas. Roy and Kori already learned most of what Dick knows about surviving on the run, months ago. He'd wonder why they haven't even considered turning on him, except he knows why not.

Dick swallows his mouthful of apple. He does turn now, gets Roy in his line of sight but still doesn't exactly look at him. "I never pretended to want anything from you but backup."

"But you _do _want more! Whole cover going but you're really just this pathetic little boy trying to get back something you can't. You've got this whole fucked-up fantasy life going on, don't you?"

Dick has crushed the apple in his hand. Pulped apple flesh is plopping wetly onto the countertop, juice puddling, and Roy wonders distantly if Dick is still going to bother to clean that up, to wipe it away so it won't make a sticky spot that will turn into a smear of grime, or if the domesticity is over after this. "I do not."

"What do you think Starfire will say, if I tell her she's been playing into your fantasies this whole time? You think she's going to—"

Dick's full weight barrels into him, and Roy finds himself pinned against the counter, way more helpless than he's ever wanted to be, with the sharp Formica corner in the small of his back and his head ringing against the wall, and his feet only barely in contact with the floor. And an unstable assassin bearing down on top of him, and something cold and sharp at his throat— "What is so _wrong,_" Talon snarls, inches from his face, "with wanting to have people to care about?"

"You don't _trick_ people into relationships, you brain-damaged fuck!" Roy snarls back. If Dick kills him, he kills him, but he figures his odds are pretty good; Dick is a cold-blooded killer, not a hot-blooded one, and while rejection leads to murder kind of a lot, he doesn't think Grayson's at that point yet.

Grayson seems to want to answer that, but he doesn't; his face is a mess of feelings Roy can't even identify, and Talon is silent and impassive so maybe feeling this much is taking all the headspace he'd need to assemble words.

"How far are you willing to go, anyway?" Roy demands, eye to eye, ignoring the prick of whatever knife Grayson's holding to his neck. It's sliding up now to caress the skin over his carotid artery, and he tries not to twitch. "You gonna chain me up so I can't run away? Would you get down on your knees for Kori and whore yourself out to get her to stay with you?"

Grayson's face switches not to good clean anger but confusion. "She doesn't want," he says, a weird, clipped half-sentence that Roy remembers from when they were kids, when Talon had to speak.

"You telling me you haven't seen the way she looks at you? God, are you _blind?_" Roy thought Dick was like him, willing to let 'sex with Kori' stay strictly in his fantasy life because the consequences of messing up if you did make a move were so dire on so many levels. She has _issues, _after all. Then again so does Grayson, though Roy didn't expect inability to notice himself getting ogled to be one of them. It happens kind of a lot, when they're out in public, and it's not like he isn't hypersensitive to being watched. Maybe he just never realized why. Being made Talon clearly doesn't remove the sex drive, unless that asshole Red Hood puts a lot of effort into faking. "Or maybe you're gay?" he guesses, lip curling, and gives an experimental squirm, because the blade at his neck is just getting less frightening at this point, and he's _mad_.

Dick still doesn't kill him, but he does press him down harder, with a sudden chokehold as if to punish him for struggling, or for the insinuation, or both. There's already no air in his lungs and he's almost to the point of involuntary thrashing, like Blackfire just before her explosion, when the hand on his throat loosens up.

"Guess—maybe—you'd enjoy chaining me up—more than I thought," Roy gasps out, with as much sneer as he can manage around the need to breathe.

He wouldn't actually be that shocked if Grayson _did_ get off on torture. His life having been what it has. Though he'd definitely rather the torture wasn't done to him. The hip crushing his groin right now is more than enough pain for the day. He kind of really hopes his guess there was wrong, come to think of it.

The other man's mouth works, like he wants words but once again can't find them. He looks angry, now, and Roy wonders why _exactly_ that was apparently his goal, when he's in no position to turn the tables. He half expects a second tongue in his mouth in the next second, even if he was wrong, just to put him in his place, and he catalogues all the very short list of potential moves he can make from this position, none of which will stop him from getting stabbed in the jugular if Grayson takes exception.

Dick lets him go, and he's surprised. He thought for sure he wasn't getting away without one of them spilling blood, one way or another. "I thought we were friends," Dick says, with no inflection and no expression whatsoever, and Roy fucking hates his creepy face.

He crosses the room, pockets his little plastic bag as if that was the goal instead of getting the table between them. "Do you see me teaching you guys Navajo words, or Kori expecting us to dress like Tamaraneans? You're the only one here trying to recreate your childhood."

"That's not why I was teaching you to freejump."

"But it is why the 'Flying Outlaws,' right?" he prods, but Dick's face stays blank. He shrugs. "I'm curious now," says Roy, who apparently has no sense of self-preservation. He blames the heroin, even if he knows he's started to come down. "How much would you have taken? If one of us _had_ pushed you for sex, would you have given in just to keep us happy?" He narrows his eyes at a sudden thought. "How many times have you done this before?"

It's a kind of victory when Dick finally shoots him a look of pure scorn. "I've been fine on my own for ten years," he says. "And I'll be fine again."

And that's when Roy realizes that it's _over_, that Kori is leaving for Tamaran and he's just burned all his bridges with the only friend he had left in the goddamn world. He's distracted enough by that that he barely hears, "I'm not as fucked up as you think, Harper," and doesn't pay that much attention as Dick goes and rinses apple juice off his sticky left hand, wearing this forbidding shroud of calm. He takes the knife that stabbed the apple earlier off the counter where Roy watched him put it down, where it's been this whole time because of _course _he had more than one on him, and washes that, too. Whatever sharp thing he ultimately didn't stab Roy to death with doesn't make another appearance.

"Why did you decide to start playing houses with us?" Roy asks, after the water shuts off and the knife vanishes again. "If you'd been alone for ten years?"

"Because I'd been alone for ten years," replies Dick, a little sardonic. "It's not that much fun."

"Okay, so why _us? _Why now?"

"I'd reminded Owlman I was still alive and then failed to kill him. I needed backup." Grayson pauses, and then picks up the crushed apple he must have dropped when he attacked Roy, and adds a little more quietly, "And then you said welcome to the team."

"So you were always planning to use us."

"That's what people like us _do!_" Grayson slams the ex-fruit into the trash can and rounds on him. "Give what you have to and take what you can. That's the code you live by! I offered you a bargain on _very favorable terms,_ knowing I could only trust you as long as I was useful. It wasn't supposed to _last_ this long. But it was—nice."

Roy has never heard Grayson say this much at once, and now he turns to the side and looks like the little boy Roy called him, all mopey profile and droopy bangs. "I'll never belong to anybody ever again," he says, with a firmness that doesn't make him seem any less young. "I _wouldn't_ have bent over backwards to keep you. But _damn_ if there's anything I wouldn't have done to keep you safe."

With that quiet, snarled confession he leaves, storms out, really, and leaves the front door open behind him. Leaving Roy in the kitchen, with apple juice congealing stickily on the countertop beside the sink, having apparently thrown away the actual loyalty of a pretty dangerous man. He's not sure he's sorry.

"Fuck you and the high horse you rode in on, Grayson," he mutters.

The drowsiness is coming in now, and he sits down at the table once more, where he was when the whole messy derailment of his evening started, sort of slumped. He should get up and close the door, but he can't really give a damn.

He doesn't really want to find out how right Grayson is, when he says being alone isn't that much fun. Going into space with Kori might be an option, except he really doubts he could possibly be useful on Tamaran, where all the fights will either be high on the meta scale or pure politics, which he's even worse at. _People like us shouldn't get mixed up in stuff at their level,_ Oliver told him cheerfully years and years ago, but he forgot his own advice when they invited him into the Society, lured by the advantages and then the prospect of being part of the new world order. And that was what brought you down, Queen, Roy thinks. Well, that and Shiva.

Not that they ever really had the option of walking away, not once the Society seriously considered Oliver as a member. If you weren't with them, after all, you were against them. And beings like Ultraman and Superwoman crushed humans like The Archer as if they were ants.

But Owlman was one of the big players, with no power to his name Oliver didn't have, and Luthor had been fighting Ultraman for years before the war ever began, so maybe it isn't the powers after all. Maybe he and Oliver were just small people, people who just couldn't measure up, making excuses.

Roy hates coming down off a high. Actually, based on the last hour or so he isn't sure he's that happy with being high in the first place. Not that his needle summoned Blackfire, or otherwise really caused any of the mess that tonight's made of his normal life of robbery and mayhem. Be smart, Harper.

Speaking of smart, Kori's got paper on her—nearly twenty-five thousand last he checked, which is a hell of a lot more than anyone would pay for him—and that fight wasn't subtle. Bounty types or cops could be here any time. He should leave. Seems unnecessarily shitty to disappear without saying bye to Kori, though, assuming she hasn't caught her taxi already and blasted out of orbit. Of course, the way tonight is going he'll probably just argue with her, too, if she shows.

He can't convince himself to get up. Most of his gear is packed, as always, but if he has to leg it in a hurry he's going to have to leave some of the heavier stuff, and while he probably _can_ get a new RPG he hates to have to. The arms market was a _mess_ by the end of the war, with everyone selling to everyone and the old black-market customers running the new post-coup government, and now the _new _new government is proving way more competent than they have any right to be, Luthor or not. Maybe if he ditches the Remington and the tripod…no, shit….

Kori bounds through the gaping door just as he was starting to drift off, and he sits up straight. "Roy," she greets, and smiles at him.

He's never seen her quite this happy, could count on his fingers and toes the number of times she's used his first name in all the months they've worked together. It's a little surreal; hard not to see an overlay of her coolly attempting to murder her sister earlier, because if he didn't know her he could mistake her for a sweet, innocent young lady right now. She's shaken off the shock of losing the inheritance she's clung to like a talisman for as long as he's known her pretty quickly, but then, that's Kori. She goes for what she wants and she rarely allows herself to brood.

She's getting off this planet, she's going home, she'll fix the problem one way or another. This chapter of her life is over. No more chains, no more skulking in the dark. No more outlaw.

Definitely no more Flying Outlaws.

"Hey," he answers, knowing his smile isn't very convincing. "Taxi coming in?"

"It will be here in three days." That makes sense, now he thinks about it—interstellar distances are big, and even though it's obvious that alien spaceships routinely go faster than light, there's probably a whole lot of space to go through between Earth and the nearest major shipping lane, or however it works. But now Kori's looking back and forth, still smiling but sort of puzzled. "Where is Dick?"

"Greywing's gone," Roy answers, like using his handle instead of his name will make any difference. Like that even _is_ his name. Roy started using it after he found it in the old newspaper coverage for the child acrobat, mostly to see what would happen, and Kori picked it up from him. And the guy never said a word. Roy still doesn't know if he liked it or hated it or didn't _care_.

Fiery eyebrows draw together. "Gone?"

"He left."

"Well, when will he be back? He _will_ be back, yes?"

"I…uh, I don't know." All his stuff is still here, but then, that stuff was pretty nearly all acquired since they became a three-man team. Grayson brought almost nothing in with him; he might intend to leave the same way. Roy never inquired into where he kept his money. (Manners, in a gang like this—an interest in someone's money is practically an open threat.)

Kori frowns now, the majestic frown that made him half believe her story of being royalty on her homeworld from the start. (Slaves who claim to have been royalty in their native land are not necessarily to be believed, but he should never have doubted her.) "Is he sulking about Blackfire?"

"I doubt it," says Roy. He's not really sure _what_ was going on in Grayson's head up on that roof, but he's pretty sure _he_ was the one who cared most about the older princess's life, which is just _sad_, Roy being the sympathetic one out of any set of people. He slouches back in his chair. "What's it matter, anyway? If you just want to say goodbye, you can leave a note or something."

"He does not wish to come to Tamaran," Kori realizes aloud. She sounds…sad. Kori _never_ sounds sad; when she's sad she gets angry. "You are coming, aren't you?"

"If you want," says Roy. Apparently Kori just _assumed_ she wasn't breaking up the band and they were all going to Tamaran now. "What for, though?"

"You…do not want to see Tamaran?" And is it that simple? She wants to show them her home, because she's proud of it, and they're her friends? Is _Roy_ the one who's shitty at friendship on this team? "Commercial spaceships are very comfortable," she adds, watching him closely. "And none of us is wanted by the Golden Lamps. It will not be unpleasant."

"Kori, if you want me, I'm there. I just didn't know if you'd have the time for doing the tourist thing."

"Until I regain my birthright, I will have nothing but time." She shrugs. "You were right. If I killed her for the throne, and the act became known, I would need to wage war against my own world to ever rule it. I am not ready to make such a sacrifice. It was unwise. You and Greywing have always advised me well."

Oh, no. "I'm not _moving to Tamaran_ to become your advisor, Kori."

She…yeah, she pouts. No fair. So not fair. "Why not?"

Because isolating himself in an unfamiliar environment, totally dependent on one person, sounds like a really terrible idea even if it is someone he pretty much trusts, and also he isn't convinced she isn't going to wind up starting a civil war. And being in the middle of a war where _everyone_ is more powerful than him sounds like the worst idea ever, even if Kori's side _wins_. The Injustice War was bad enough. "My life's ambition isn't to be anyone's crippled pet alien."

Pink energy flickers around her fists, and her jaw works. "I am _not her,_" Kori grates out. "Why do both of you keep _doing_ this?"

Shit. "I didn't mean it like that. I just…think about what you said to your sister. She was pathetic because she couldn't beat you at hand-to-hand or fly. I can't do those things either." He would be weak on Tamaran, and Roy has spent his whole life avoiding weakness. "I'll come, like I said, if you want me. But I can't _stay._"

Something like understanding in Kori's expression. "And what does Richard say?"

"We didn't really discuss it." Roy pauses. "He thinks you're splitting on us, though. He seemed kind of broken up about it, honestly."

"Do you think he will want to come?"

After what Roy said to him? He has no idea. Possibly only if Starfire and Greywing can leave Arsenal behind. "Maybe."

"We will all be free on Tamaran," Kori concludes, clearly brooking no argument.

And Roy will admit that being the guest of royalty is way better than scratching out an illegal living while trying to stay two steps ahead of meta-assisted law enforcement, and if it all goes to shit, well, he's never liked things boring.

"Sounds good," he says. And it does. He's never been _really_ unfree, beyond a few hours in lockup here and there till he made bail, and while he's technically been a criminal since he was thirteen, he's spent less than two years on the run, outside Queen's protection, and it's already exhausting. Better than boring, yeah; normality sounds like an even worse trap, but still. He misses being able to go out in the street without worrying about being recognized and hunted down. He misses _not_ having to be just a little bit on guard all the time.

The war ended, for everyone else, but for people like him it got worse once it was over—and he never had ambitions to be a veteran in the first place. He joined the mob, not the army. (When he was seventeen, he thought it wouldn't be long before he'd never have to be afraid again, and he honestly thought Talon was one of the worst things he'd ever face.)

Dick hasn't been free like that since he was _six_.

"Did Greywing take his phone?" Kori asks, locating her own, which somehow survived the fight with Blackfire.

Roy shrugs.

…he _hates_ caring about people. Damn Richard Grayson's emotionally manipulative ass.

Dick's ringtone sounds tinnily from just down the hall, and a few seconds later he skulks in at the door, looking embarrassed, in the expressionless way Roy is pretty sure is his _genuine_ embarrassed face. Did he even go anywhere, or was he already coming back? Kori's face lights up again when she sees him.

"So we're going to Tamaran?" Grayson asks, looking at neither of them.

"Three days," says Starfire.

Roy remembers, as if from another lifetime, that they had plans for tomorrow. "Are we still going to go through with the job for Kord?" he asks.

Kori's eyebrows draw down. They have enough time to do it, definitely, and Roy is after all planning to come back to Earth at some point and would like to still have a reputation for getting the job done, when he does. "You are sure," she asks again, "that he does not want the girl to keep?"

Roy got them the job, of course; he's the only one with contacts, for what they're worth. "Or to resell," he confirms. He has levels to which he would not sink even if both his team members _didn't_ have personal reasons to refuse to be involved in human trafficking. He's not a good man, but he has _some_ standards. He checked the job out really thoroughly when the target turned out to be seven. "It's just standard extortion. Industrial espionage stuff. She'll be home again in a few days."

"Very well," Kori pronounces.

"Before I go start the last round of surveillance," says Dick, "help me start deciding what to pack? Supplies for offworld?"

And somehow he gets Kori thinking about Earth products to bring back as souvenir offering things for her parents. (_Parents. _Who are _alive. _Holy shit. He knows people have them, just…holy shit.) She's very nearly bubbly.

"The two of us will have to rebase to the holding site while you're stalking," Roy says to Grayson while Kori is debating the merits of Hostess cupcakes. Dick cuts his eyes sidelong at him, but nods, before turning back to Kori. They'll get this apartment cleared out and be ready to leave the planet as soon as they make the handoff. They won't come back here after tonight.

Roy leans back against the counter, in the same place Dick pinned him not half an hour ago, Formica hard in the small of his back, and watches them.

He doesn't have to come to Tamaran, he thinks. Kori wants her friends with her, but she'll be satisfied with just one. Grayson has nothing to tie him to Earth; he can go with Kori and never look back, and maybe away from the planet where all the Superwoman shit went down she'll finally start to feel comfortable enough with her own skin to make a move on the moron, and then they'll live happily ever after on Tamaran. He can be her ninja assassin consort and help her win her civil war with a series of knives to the back. There's no place in any of that for him.

(Ever since Richard Grayson appeared on a roof in Detroit and insinuated himself into their partnership, he's known this was coming. At some level, he's been getting ready for it all along. They don't need him. They never did.)

((There were moments where he thought about making a move on Kori not so much because she was gorgeous but just in hopes of staking a claim to a place in her life that had nothing to do with how useful he was. But he knows a terrible idea when he thinks it. (The same strategy would work better against Dick, who is stupid enough to cling and cling like he thinks people are something you can keep, but that would be markedly less fun and would probably have made Kori leave. And it would still destroy them both in the end.) Roy's seen enough couples together for mismatched reasons to know how that turns out. And he has his pride, anyway.))

(((Why couldn't Grayson have let it stay just work; Roy knows how to do work; he was with Queen for fifteen years and never made the mistake of _caring_, even though the job was practically his whole life. Roy knows better than to care and he hates them both for making him let his guard down even though he knew better, and now they're going to leave. They were always going to leave.)))

((((Being left behind is better than being thrown out, though. Leaving first is best of all.))))

"Roy," says Dick. And he's crossed the room in his stupid ninja way and is standing too close, though he doesn't try to touch him, at least, not this soon after the little holding-at-knifepoint incident. Normally the idea of Grayson voluntarily touching anybody would be laughable, but Roy's not counting anything out today. "You're coming, right?"

"Of course he is," says Kori, as she closes the apartment door and sets the lock with careful precision lest it break in her hand. "He promised me."

And the princess of Tamaran looks over her shoulder with big expectant green eyes, and the man who was Talon bites a little at his lower lip in uncertainty that might be real or might be feigned, and then they both smile so bright it hurts when Roy rolls his eyes and gives a sigh. "Yeah, yeah, I'm coming to Tamaran. Let's just get this one last job done before we go."

* * *

**_A/N:_**_ You know Green Arrow had the kid _audition_ before he accepted custody? And they say Batman has parenting problems._

_Also, worked in Evil Ted Kord! I find this hard to even picture. And unlike Ollie he avoided joining the Society and being dragged into their hubris. Maybe his time-travelling partner tipped him off. O.O Evil Booster Gold. I am successfully picturing this and it is freaking me the hell out._


	27. Illa Rapit

'_Illa_ _Rapit_'

* * *

She felt suffocated sometimes, being her father's daughter. Not because of anything he did, or demanded. Because of the unforgiving eyes plastered to his back, the mute insistencies and nameless dread, impotent duty, the choke of loss where her brother and then her mother should have been.

Should have left with her, gone to Chicago and set up a new life, but it hadn't been permitted, not by the shadow that ruled over them and needed her here to threaten. And Mom had left without her, left her to Gotham and its horrors rather than risk staying. A daughter was only worth so much. She told herself she was glad; Gotham's darkness suited her. Giving up the jagged line of the hills and the dynamic curve of the gargoyles' backs, poised forever to spring into flight, for the tame shores of Lake Michigan, that would be a waste. She was _glad_ her mother had left her behind.

Dad didn't date, even as the fact of divorce settled in, or even go looking, but she knew it wasn't because he wasn't lonely, wasn't interested, even didn't have the time. He just wasn't willing to bring anybody else within range of this curse that he'd brought down on them with who-knew-what. The softness behind his eyes, maybe. The stubbornness in the set of his jaw that crumbled a little with every year. It didn't matter, in the end.

When she put on the mask for the first time, breath finally came easily again. Swarming over the rooftops like a living shadow, it came easy as the steps to a dance she'd been rehearsing for years.

The freedom wasn't enough on its own for long, of course, the simple rush of running. Before long she had to jump out at people, the shadow leaping from a cranny into three-dimensional life or dropping from the sky like a raptor to its prey. Soon enough, she needed to take prey.

It wasn't much. A double line of scratches across a girl's face because the little ditz wouldn't fucking _cry._ A leather jacket ripped off a young man's back. He wasn't cool enough to pull off the look. A wallet or so, but just for the fun of it. This wasn't about money. Had never been about money. This was _power_, and the freedom of it.

She called herself Strix, _the-owl-the-witch-the-soul-stealing-shriek_, and people cowered from the round-eyed mask because most of them didn't know the difference, had no way of knowing she wasn't just another feathery finger of the Court. Fire-red hair and ash-grey rattling pinions. _Beware, beware!_ she cackled sometimes. Other times she saved her breath to fight.

Because dropping out of the sky in a mask drew attention, it was the kind of thing people talked about even if you _didn't_ beat them up and take their stuff as trophies. Fighting vigilante types had been inevitable, and she liked it. Liked the light of recognition in their eyes, the way they said _oho, Strix, _and _you again_. Liked the challenge of it. Liked letting out all the stops against these stupid, worthless heroes who'd never been able to protect anything she cared about. Liked laughing right back in their ugly faces.

_He_ noticed her, of course. It took longer than she would have expected; she was almost disappointed in him. Or maybe he'd been waiting to see what she did with her stolen reputation. He was good at that, at waiting. And at hunting.

She gave him a long chase, from the seaside end of Chinatown clear up across the East Side. Knew she was winning because he didn't call any of his minions, not even Talon who always seemed more like a part of the Owl detached than a real boy. Let him catch her, at last, on the roof of the old clock tower.

She fought just hard enough to show that she wasn't just into being chased, but not hard enough to piss him off and get pinned by her throat instead of the middle of her chest. He didn't recognize her. Not that she thought it would make a difference, probably; she didn't know what his thing with her father was exactly so she couldn't be sure. But he offered her training and a place in his Court, offered _Strix_ a place, not Gordon's daughter. More strength of her own and a larger share of his power than the scraps she'd been stealing.

She told him _no thanks_.

He watched her for a few long seconds, deciding whether to kill her, probably. Might be the dent she'd put in Enigma's skull the week before was all that saved her.

Then his face bent in a smile like death and he gave her names. People to talk to, to learn from. Places where all that mattered was the strength of your fist and the will behind it. It was more frightening than anything else about him had ever been, even more frightening than the moment she'd realized that someone had _killed_ her little brother. That Owlman knew so clearly what she wanted, what she _needed_, without ever seeing her face or knowing her name.

And he let her go.

He let her go knowing she would come back, eventually. And she did. After sculpting herself into a weapon, after years clawing her way up the heap and cutting her teeth on some of the shittiest mercenary jobs on the open market, after earning a reputation as one of those deadly women who was too intelligent to take your eyes off for a second, after surviving a duel with Shiva, after getting technique drummed into her by Dinah Lance, after sniping a target from David Cain and walking away without a hair out of place.

After 'dealer in rare books' turned into 'general antiquities,' and even her cover identity of her legal self was smuggling rare poisons into the country. After the Talon she'd once tried so hard to tease any expression out of went down, fucking up a White House job. After she'd become a name to respect, and could set her own price and cherry-pick the work she took.

She came back, with her coterie, her own feathered minions, and she set herself up just a little way away, in the less inspiring heights of Bludhaven—she had almost forgotten, by then, the way she had loved the inutterable potential caged in a gargoyle straining in the instant before flight—and contacted him. She'd never be his. But she was available for hire.

Overseer, now. Because Strix had been too much a shade of him, was too much like belonging. Overseer and the Birds of Prey.

Become what you fear, and it will no longer have power over you.

Barbara Gordon was free as the black night wind_._

* * *

_**A/N: **Okay, because as Oracle Barbara is a huge manipulator and occasionally worries she's turning into Bruce, and as Batgirl she was largely defined by the space between Jim and Batman. And the Birds of Prey required no name change because they already sound pretty evil.  
_


	28. War Stories I: Conference Call

War Stories I: 'Conference Call'

* * *

**_A/N: _**_First look into_ _the midst of the Injustice War! (Extensive canon notes at foot.)_

* * *

In the small underground cavern most of Gotham's insurgents called 'Rebel Base,' Jokester was pulled out of his narrow-eyed contemplation of a city map dotted in colored pins, when the comm he had clipped to his ear crackled to life. It was the voice of The Computer, who'd spent the last six weeks remotely running the wartime underground communication and surveillance infrastructure from a bunker so hidden, none of his allies had any idea where to look.

"Jokester!" Computer called out, distractedly, over the sharp clatter of his own typing. "Videocall for you on channel four!"

"No need to shout, Noah," Jokester muttered, tapping his ear with a wince. The comm had already gone dead again. Channel four, huh? From outside the Northeast, then. Not an emergency line, but pretty darn secure, so somebody important or somebody really paranoid. And they'd gone through Noah directly, so it was probably pretty important. Strategy meeting? J shuffled over to the only unoccupied console in this half of the Ops room, and tapped in the appropriate code.

"Fishface! Caveman!" he exclaimed as a picture flickered to life, pleased as always to see familiar faces and incapable as ever of anything closely resembling formal manners. "Hey, how's it going?"

The immortal Vandar Adg huffed in badly-concealed amusement at the other end of the line, but over his shoulder Ocean Keeper couldn't quite muster either a smile or a scowl. He was leaning visibly on his trident. "West Coast operations are fine," Adg said. "But communications with Metropolis cut off abruptly. Have you heard from Luthor in the last half hour?"

"No." Worry was showing nakedly on the mad clown's face as he turned from the screen. "Hey, Ed! Can you raise Metropolis?"

"Already trying!" Enigma called back. J had long since passed his bad habit of eavesdropping on to all his closest friends.

"At least you're still operating," said Orm. His round dark face relaxed a little with his words, but he was still obviously weary. Jokester hadn't seen him that grey since the Death Valley Incident of '02. "We were having visions of mass nuclear strikes."

"The League of the Rhine hasn't spent fifteen years sabotaging the world's nuclear arsenals for nothing," replied J with a shrug. "Not to brag or anything. Kahndaq got hit yesterday by twelve missiles without payloads, and Adam got the one live one into space before it blew—and we need someone to back Good Samaritan and Seventeen up in Russia, by the way, while I have you on the line."

"I need to get back to Atlantis soon," Orm demurred. Privately J thought he needed to _rest_. "I've finished my business on the raincoast, Star and SanFran are fully onboard, and Manta can't manage both the capital and New Venice operations much longer, even with Ventura City in open rebellion."

Well, that explained some of the exhaustion. Black Manta and Ocean Keeper in theory considered each other respected allies against the brutal and expansionist King Orin, but in practice they couldn't be in a room together for more than five minutes without descending into increasingly strident argument. J was pretty sure Dave didn't try to be offensive and Orm didn't try to take offense, but it always seemed to happen.

"Stop by Gotham on your way to New Venice, couldja?" he asked, because commenting on relations with Manta wasn't likely to improve them. Past experience had shown. "I've got a package for Ducard Sr., and last I heard he was organizing the Italian resistance."

America was in many ways lucky thus far—so many of the Society's members were already in positions of power there that the conquest had been relatively bloodless. In Gotham, it was almost as though nothing had changed, apart from the police force losing its collective mind. Well, and the National Guard units. And the curfew. And Owlman's mark being stamped over everything. And the media broadcasts, and the sheer volume of fugitives Jokester's network had been evacuating ever since the Society made their move. Still. The Amazonian occupation of most of Europe, on the other hand, was getting out of hand, and Atlantis kept invading everywhere else with a coastline that hadn't already been pacified.

Orm bit his lip thoughtfully. "I'll see what I can do," he said, which was fair. The Atlantean home front was one of the most important in the war, and depending on what was up with Metropolis, he might not be able to risk stopping on the East Coast, especially here in the Owl's nest. J could get a carrier down along the coast, if necessary.

"And I will do what I can about Russia," Vandar declared. Ten thousand years ago, he'd lived somewhere east of the Black Sea, and he still took an interest in the general region. "Have you told Al Ghul?"

The League of Shadows was deeply embroiled in the war on all fronts, and Ra's was a priority assassination target, so he'd been hard to pin down for some time now. And he was still giving J the cold shoulder, as much as they could afford with the world in this state, from that thing right before the war. Most of their mutual allies hadn't noticed, and kept expecting him to be in close cahoots with the Demon's Head.

Jokester shrugged. "His people know; I talked to the Tbilisi cell, and they called Baku. They don't have all that many heavy hitters, though, and nobody to spare."

Vandar snorted. "Nobody has anyone to spare," he retorted. "If the enemy do not turn on one another soon, we will have to begin withdrawing from some areas of the fight, or be slowly crushed."

"That is not new information," said Harvey Dent, stepping abruptly into the view of the camera, just behind Jokester's shoulder. He didn't have his mask on, and even the black half of his suit was starting to look worn, and the mostly-paralyzed muscles around his right eye had been locked into their most world-weary, sardonic slant for days now. "Unless you want us to conspire about who to abandon, let's move on."

Ocean Keeper's jaw clenched, but after a second Vandar's face split into a grin full of big blunt teeth. (Immortality was impressive and all, but J had always had particular respect for his immortal _teeth; _most parts of a person were slowly replaced over time, but ten thousand years of chewing had to make those the closest thing to an indestructible substance known to man.) "Very well, then. You will have to hope the rest of us do not conspire to leave you to your own devices."

Harvey's mouth twisted. The thing was, it wasn't a real threat; Gotham was too much of a nerve center of the counterinsurgency to be anything but a final redoubt, in spite of the great weight of Owlman's power there. The ancient was making a point about responsibility, and the luxury of focusing on the immediate and neglecting the long-term—and of relying too much on any alliance.

They could hardly tell him they had enough to worry about already, though Harvey might want to. Jokester _knew_ Vandar wasn't as indifferent as he acted, and knew that it was important to have someone with his perspective, someone who could take the long view and still be prepared to act in the present for the greater good. It was just...hard to keep that in mind, when every heartbeat tried to spend itself on counting the names of those you loved who were out of sight, and therefore might be dead before you saw them again. Red Hood, for one, had missed his last check-in, and if J let himself he would be sick with worry.

Just as Jokester put a steadying hand on Harvey's elbow, an interruption from behind removed the need for him to run interference.

"I know what's happened to Metropolis."

Enigma instantly had everyone's attention, but he made them wait the few seconds it took to get comfortably in-frame with the conference call and meet the original querents' eyes from under the brim of his hat, before continuing.

"The news is better than it could be," he announced. "I got through to Tigress, who got cut off heading up into Metropolis from Baltimore at ten thirty-three exactly, and saw the whole thing. Ultraman's erected some sort of Kryptonian energy shield. Purple dome, five miles across. Nobody in or out but him."

"So Alex is rattling him," said Jokester, focusing on the positive. Hadrian's Wall, to take an example from history because he had too many geeky friends and it had clearly worn off on him, might have been a declaration of authority, after all, but it was also a blatant admission of that authority's limits.

Although, unfortunately, he couldn't say that either Metropolis or its environs were overrun by fiercely independent Picts and Scots who refused to bow to the power of the House of El. Bah. Close enough. Alex would be a redhead if he had hair. J had seen the one surviving baby picture.

"What kind of control measure is a _force field?_" demanded Livewire, squinting up from the workstation she'd taken over to run their internet-media presence and public information dispersal. J had known she was listening, but Enigma jumped a little, and Vandar on the screen looked him dryly askance, as if to say _exactly how many people are listening in on your average secure communication? _Jokester ignored him. Leslie was from Metropolis originally; she automatically had a personal stake in this. "If he was only controlling the city, that would be one thing, but stopping people moving in and out of it, when he's got the whole country? That's hinky. Maybe he _is_ planning to nuke the East Coast and wants to keep his favorite city clean."

"I was thinking...some kind of purge," said Harvey, and J scowled at them both.

"Negative thinkers, that's what you are." It was true, though, that if Ultraman was feeling pressed he was much more likely to do something crazy. "He's probably just trying to make sure Alex can't run away. Like he would anyway."

"Heh," Ed chuckled. "Luthor'll be fine. He's got Henshaw _and _that Bob clone locked in there with him. And the rest of those crazies."

"And Lois," pointed out J.

Orm said, "Let's hope they're all fine." Shook himself, and focused on J again. "I have to go."

J gave him the only thing he could right now: an understanding smile. "Yeah, okay, Gills. We'll be in touch."

Livewire hit one last key and flickered to her feet. "There aren't many energy barriers that can hold me," she stated, accurately. "I'll head south, scout Metropolis and report back if I can."

"Good," pronounced Vandar Adg, and with more than due gravitas reached out and cut the call.

Under Gotham, a clown snickered, and let his thumbs-up pose drop. "He does that," he informed his comrades. "I think he wants us to think he's so old he doesn't understand how to be polite via technology or something."

Harvey snorted; Enigma sniggered. Leslie rolled her eyes.

* * *

**_A/N: _**_So many characters! :D _

_Ocean Master is _always_ Aquaman's half-brother Orm, but his background changes wildly with every retcon. This universe pulls from the second post-Crisis variation, where their shared parent is an immortal royal Atlantean wizard, but Orin's mom is Queen Atalanta and Orm's is a nice girl from a traditionalist coastal Inupiak community. The Atlantean city of Ventura was rather poorly ruled by the early Wonder Woman villain Queen Clea. (She of the many slave girls.) Atlantis itself appears to be the seat of an empire composed of subject city-states._

_Black Manta is, fun story, the only comic character I know of who was called 'Black Something' long before he was a black guy, by virtue of not showing his face for about twenty years, and it took even longer for them to name him. He still only has a first name. David is David. (Also, he's autistic. His villain origin is evil brain-torturing Arkham autism 'treatments.' My research has left me with all kinds of new respect for Black Manta.) _

_Vandar Adg is Vandal Savage's real name; Noah Kuttner is Calculator; Hank Henshaw is Cyborg Superman. Bonus point, Tigress III is Artemis Crock. ^^ Livewire is a very minor and recent electrical Superman villain who's been drawn into the peripheral Gotham Rogues' Gallery; she used to be a radio jockey. Bad Samaritan was a Georgian Outsiders villain with a Hitler fixation; Subjekt 17 was born in Soviet Kazakhstan, after his parents' spaceship crashed and his pregnant mother was seized by the government. The one in this universe managed somehow not to blame the human race as a whole for evil science._


	29. A Killing Frost

'A Killing Frost'

_**A/N: **__To my dweebish delight, Killer Frost's powers actually do work by her absorbing massive amounts of heat from her environment, resulting in the thermodynamic phenomenon of 'cold.' This is because she was originally a Firestorm villain and Firestorm has the best physics of any superhero, fullstop. (Despite the fact that he's two people fused together and his head is on fire, yes, shut up.)_

_You have no idea how much I wanted to call her Frostbearer. (Becaus cryophorus.) But I'm trying to limit the number of geeky pun names I give people, and Gawain __**hated**__ it. Anyway, putting your real name in your hero name is stupid. Though Victor Frieze cares not._

* * *

As Crystal pounded down the hill, dragging every iota of heat she could find out of the frostbitten air while she could, she could hear her own voice echoing loudly in memory.

"_Come on, no," she'd groaned, when Heat Sink and Deep Freeze had slammed into combat alongside the Gotham Circus a few months ago and, fighting back to back with Harlequin, she'd gotten yet another tease about her imaginary love life. "I do not think of Victor like that. Just because you're _madly_ in love you have to go projecting it on everyone else?"_

"_Hee, I'm sorry, it's just…you're partners…."_

"_If you can tell me you pull the same thing on Mothman and Firefly I'll give you a pass. No? Come on, Harlequin! Where's your pride as a woman?"_

_The tiny zanni kicked a goon in the sternum and thrust her chin out. "Right where it belongs! My sense of romance is a bit old-fashioned, that's all."_

"_Pfft. I'm glad you're happy with your lunatic and all, but girl, I do not need a man to be happy. And even if I did, Victor is too old for me, not my type, and as married as you are." _

_She hit the pavement as the rattle of automatic fire burst into the air, and Harlequin went flat beside her, sheltering behind what had been a decorative raised stone flower bed. The clown gave Crystal a sidelong look from her crouch. "I thought he was a widower…?"_

"_Technically, no. He's…don't tell him I told you this, but he's got Nora in cryo. Keeps trying to teach himself more and more advanced autoimmune medicine, like he'll be able to discover a cure to Eckles-Leifson's Disease all by himself and unfreeze her and live happily ever after." Crystal squinted over the wall in a break in the gunfire, spotted the man reloading his machine gun, and sniped him with one well-placed ice dagger. "It would be creepy if he wasn't such a dork," she shrugged, leaping upright as the bad guys who'd hung back while covering fire had been going on surged forward. None of them had the wherewithal to seize the downed man's weapon. Thank science for stupid bad guys. "He's a good guy, and he watches my back, but we're not like that. So can you just…"_

"_I'll stop," Harlequin had promised, going into a hyperaccelerated spin on Crystal's patch of ice to sweep out the feet of a whole line of goons, but Crystal could tell from the smile in her voice that she didn't buy it._

It was _true,_ though, she thought furiously, as she stumbled to a stop at the edge of the frozen river and stomped down on her power with all her might, refusing to swallow an iota of the tiny amount of heat that existed in this air. They weren't like that. Victor was as sexy as a log.

But she hadn't realized until now just how important he _was_ to her. They were partners. She _trusted _him. That meant a lot. Three years working together… "Come on, Vic," she whispered, reaching out with hands that _would not_ freeze what they touched and dragging his limp limbs free of the ice. He'd stripped off his shirt before passing out; she didn't even know if that was the hypothermia thing or a clumsy attempt at decontamination. "You're going to make it. Breathe."

That _stupid_ cryochamber, she thought bitterly, as she dragged his dead weight over her shoulders and began the long trek uphill again toward somewhere she could start hypothermia treatment. Stupid, stupid freezerchest. Oh, she understood that sometimes people would do anything rather than let go of someone they loved, but did he have to keep trying to improve it? The Missus was good and frozen already, wasn't she? And if he had to tinker with it, why'd he have to drag Crystal and her extensive experience with supercoolants in?

_You were all for it,_ her better nature reminded her acidly. _Lower the power requirements for Nora's Cooler? Save money? Do awesome science? Where's the downside?_

The downside was slumped across her back, with a rapidly dwindling core temperature that Crystal's own body kept trying to cannibalize even as it fell. _God_, why couldn't she transfer heat energy to anyone besides herself? Why did she have to get such a hungry, selfish power?

"Why'd you have to break a coolant line, you big idiot?" she muttered. Her foot slipped on a patch of ice, sweet irony, and she almost dropped her partner and went tumbling down the hill again, probably to break at least one of their crowns, or break through the river crust and drown. She hit her knees instead, held onto Victor, lurched onto her feet again.

Thirty more yards, she told herself. Thirty more yards and we're back in the lab. The part that _isn't _full of sublimated experimental substances. "And if you had to have a stupid lab accident," she grated, wedging her right foot into a dent in the dirty snow and heaving the both of them another six inches higher, "what possessed you to go tearing out into the night and fall down a hill before you passed out? This is why I hate you, you know that? You get carried away! No matter what's going on, you always…"

Her heart jolted. _Just_ as she'd gotten high enough to see over the ridge, barely a minute from the goal…she felt her partner's body heat give out. There was _nothing there._ His stiff, heavy weight had not changed a straw, but to her sense of warmth he might as well have been just another piece of the frozen night. A slab of ice or stone. "No," she breathed.

"_No!"_ she shouted, and with everything she had charged the rest of the way up the hill, slammed her way inside the kind warmth of their lab, dropped Victor onto his own discarded coat, lying on the floor from earlier this evening when he'd been too much of a slob to hang it up before getting to work, for long enough to get a blanket over the stainless-steel counter, and then heaved him up onto it with strength she hadn't known she had.

Her tears jingled against the edge of the counter, peeling off her cheeks as solid crystals when the skin under them stretched with her grimace of effort. "Don't you dare," she ground out, as she swung the heat lamps into place above the work surface, trying to get his blood warmed again. She groped for a lab knife, then made herself calm down enough to slice off his stiff-frozen slacks and snowman boxers without drawing blood. "Don't you _dare_ die, Vic. Don't you dare." The good thing about her power, she thought as she shook up a handful of chemical heat packs (designed to be tucked inside gloves and boots), was that it meant that in winter they kept around a _hell _of a lot of sources of artificial heat.

She laid a paper towel over Victor's chest and slapped the little pouches across it, letting them do their exothermic thing while she got a blanket over him. "You aren't dying," she told him. He'd been tens of degrees below the temperatures that usually caused organ failure even before he went ambient-cold. Didn't matter. "We are going to figure out what the hell was in that line, and fix it. And Luthorcorp has a team working on Eckles-Leifson's right now, you think I'm going to wake Nora up to get cured just to tell her you got yourself killed trying to save her? I don't even know the woman!"

The fierce little furnace in the basement was cranked up to full blast, and the temperature in the lab was steadily climbing toward eighty. Crystal rounded on the inert form of her friend, shook a finger. She knew she couldn't rush this; warm a hypothermia patient too fast and they went into shock. Which could be just as fatal.

"No, you are surviving this," she ordered. "And getting better. And we are going to do more science and eat stupid kettle corn and next summer we are going to the board walk again and getting those awful ice-cream bars, and we won't have to costume up and avert a boatjacking this time, and…and…" She rubbed at her eyes with the back of one hand; her tears had rimed so heavily on her eyelashes it was obscuring her vision. "You've gotta introduce me to Nora someday," she said hopelessly. "You promised."

The whole room was warming up, and he was still a blank spot in her heat-sense. Cold, cold, icy cold.

No amount of talking was going to change that. He'd been dead before she even started treatment. She'd failed him. Maybe there'd been no saving him, maybe that coolant _she'd helped him develop _had sealed his fate, even before he'd ever burst out into the dark like the idiot he was. Maybe she'd never had a chance. Crystal's fists shook. And then she moved forward, stiff, her own breathing jerky in her ears. She didn't have the right equipment to treat severe hypothermia—there were heated oxygen masks and warm-fluid IVs and things, she'd read a _lot_ about hypothermia treatment trying to combat her own nightmares of freezing everyone around her to death—and that was her own stupid short-sightedness, but maybe CPR would get his heart going, and then if she called an ambulance they could still…

She jumped. He still had a pulse.

Had a pulse in his throat, in his _wrist,_ when she checked. He was breathing, in tiny puffs, and his breath was cold.

That wasn't possible.

It wasn't possible, but _she_ was alive, and endothermic as anything. When she wanted to be.

Experimental coolant. Different from the ultra coldbox she'd been trapped in, but—could the same thing happen twice?

The quest for absolute zero.

It had had at least one completely bizarre casualty. No matter how low the odds were, the fact that it had happened at all more or less determined that the chances of repetition were non-zero.

It didn't matter how unlikely it was. Her partner was _alive._

Crystal got his body temperature up to a chilly 25°C with continual heat infusion, and then faced a crisis: where she would have swallowed down the heat until she got enough strength back to stop pulling so much ambient energy, and effectively increased in temperature, Victor was warming only slightly slower than the average frozen corpse. (It should have been faster, if anything; none of his body fluids had frozen solid. She needed to take a blood sample; was he _replicating_ the supercoolant biologically? She wasn't a biologist, dammit!)

More importantly, he was starting to show all the signs of heat stroke, apart from the thing where he was still _below possible temperatures for survival_.

Everything she knew said to keep warming him up. There were other reasons his blood pressure could be falling and his heart fluttering, and his breath coming shorter and shorter, for him to have started and then dramatically stopped sweating. He'd just been covered in substances never tested on living things before being frozen. It could be it was only the extreme cold that had slowed down the poisoning until now. She should call the hospital _now._

Except he was alive, he'd had a normal heartbeat at 3°C and something clearly abnormal was happening, but if she called an ambulance procedure would _demand,_ absolutely and at the risk of the firing of every EMT, nurse, and doctor involved, that they try to get him up to normal human temperature, because that was what you did when you had a hypothermic patient. They probably wouldn't listen to her, not when she had no hard data and wasn't a doctor herself. If hypothermia went unchecked, it caused organ failure far more irreparably than an equivalent dose of cold. So letting them determine by trial and error what she'd come to suspect was taking too much of a risk with Vic's life.

Not that this wasn't.

Facing the possible consequences head-on, Crystal _ripped_ the heat from the air around Victor. From the blankets covering him, and all the trusty little chem-packs and hot water bottles underneath. She pulled until the temperature hovered around the freezing point of water, and then kept it there, drinking in any warmth that tried to invade the bubble of air around the table. She could have taken more—there was _plenty_ of heat left in matter at 273 Kelvin—but she wouldn't. Just to be safe. It was only ten below outside; if Vic hadn't been covered in supercoolants he wouldn't have had time to become _seriously_ hypothermic before she rescued him.

His body dumped heat into the air and the now-chilly water bottles and the steel countertop like water through a sluice gate, and as his core temperature dropped past ten, his breathing eased toward something still shallow, but no longer ragged. She hauled out a blood pressure cuff and, assuming her memory of normal biostats was both correct and still applicable, that was improving, too. Crystal moved away, keeping the temperature around his worktop steady, to turn the furnace down and check the seal around the door to the testing lab. The vents had kicked in, and were shunting the fumes into storage tanks. Crystal was just weighing how long she could afford to wait before leaving Victor alone to go make sure Nora wasn't thawing, when his breath changed.

For the first time since the coolant line had broken, Victor Frieze drew a deep breath. Crystal fairly flew back across the lab, and got there in time to see his eyes flick open.

They'd been brown, before. Now they were pale, pale blue. She swallowed.

Victor's brow furrowed, with those lines the fretful idiot had already given himself by the time he hit thirty. "Crystal…?" he croaked at her.

Relief hit her like a train she hadn't even known she was waiting for. He was still there. Still Vic.

"You're going to be okay," she told him.

His eyes widened a little, and he tried to sit up. "Is Nora—the lab accident—"

Crystal pushed him back before he could collapse. "Relax. The cooler is still solid, and the whole lab is still sub-zero. I'll go out and tinker with the thing in a bit, you just lie back and pull yourself together. You thirsty?"

"Uh…I am, actually." He shifted a little, frowning at the spent heat-packs sliding off his torso and the bottles of water with ice rattling inside propped against his sides and legs. "What…" He peered under the blankets, and didn't quite blush. "Wait, did you…?"

Crystal snorted as she dug out a new water bottle. Not that the ones he already had were contaminated by being used as heat-dumps, but it was still the courteous thing. "You got covered in experimental chemicals, moron. If you're into dying to preserve your modesty, by all means…"

Mortification was chased by annoyance and then chagrin. "Sorry." Victor fidgeted; Crystal decided right then to deny him clothes for a while in hopes it would keep him still. "Thank you."

"I'm not sure how much help I was," Crystal admitted. She'd almost killed him; he'd probably have been better off recovering on the frozen river, without the extra stress she'd put on his system trying to warm him up.

Vic didn't argue; he'd already lost interest in his near-death experience. "You can see to Nora now," he said, as he accepted the new water and Crystal sat him up enough to drink it without it going up his nose. "I'm fine."

She didn't argue for long. She turned the heat off and cracked the outside door—Vic was smart; if she put this off a little longer he'd work out he was some kind of meta now and she wouldn't have to tell him—and slid into a hazmat suit to go confront Nora's Goddamn Cooler.

Really, she reflected, she had nothing against Nora Frieze. She _did_ have something against the sight of a woman, dead for all practical purposes, frozen in a box, because that should have been her. That _had_ been her; she remembered dying, she'd just lived through it.

And now she'd watched her best friend die because of her work, even if he'd woken up again, too. If thermodynamics weren't so endlessly fascinating, maybe she'd have given up on science by now. But her powers opened avenues of study no one else could pursue, and vigilantism was nothing to build a life around, so here she was. Drinking in the cold.

There would be time later to worry about side effects and dangers of Vic's condition, about whether he'd blame her once he had a chance to get his bearings, and whether it would be necessary to seek a research grant to Antarctica or something. For now...

She stepped into the lab, into the cold, to do what she could. As ever.

* * *

_**A/N: **…so this is my second fic in which an unconscious man gets chemical heaters applied to his torso. I think those things are cool, alright? Metaphorically. Literally would be pointless. _

_Fairly generous margins for heat tolerance were permitted to keep Crystal from killing Victor with correct hypothermia treatment. I would like everyone to acknowledge her responsible observation of procedure in checking for a pulse, before she attempted CPR on what she was quite certain was a dead guy. Always do that._

_I profoundly hope that Killer Frost has at least one fan following this story who's delighted to see her spotlight feature. :D Failing that, I hope any Mr. Freeze fans were satisfied with him spending most of the chapter as baggage.  
_


	30. Ornithology 101

'Ornithology 101'

**_A/N: _**_Happy New Year! Thank you to the lovely SwordStitcher for reviewing last chapter only five days after the previous one, which was in retrospect clearly too soon to post if I wanted much feedback, as well as to the anon 'A VERY BIG Fan,' who left me a delightful Christmas review. _

_Please note as we begin that the American Robin is a relatively heavy, round-bodied dark-grey thrush, with breast ranging from dirty orange to dull scarlet, more than three times the size of its brighter-throated English namesake. Warning for minor disturbing imagery. Talon. _

_This chapter immediately follows 'Beware the Court of Owls.'_

* * *

Talon ran.

It was the correct response. He was outnumbered, by armed enemies, in hostile territory. He'd been forced into open confrontation with an unexpectedly powerful opponent. The mission was completed. Capture was unforgiveable. Flight was correct.

His cape and mask had been left behind in the President's hands. Evidence. Proof-of-existence. More damning than his own blood or any number of eyewitnesses. _Those_ could lead only to him, and he was a ghost. There was the faint chance that the abandoned equipment could lead back to the Court.

The mission was completed. The circumstances were far from ideal, but the targets had been neutralized, and he had betrayed nothing vital.

It was _completed._

(He remembered feeling more satisfaction in that, years ago.)

Successive protocol, go to ground in the Court's DC safehouse—not the nice one, for Courtiers; a secret one, buried in the walls of a tall building in the ambassadorial district. Rinse away the bloodstains, eat an MRE, and lie down on the cot. Sleep was an efficient use of time designated for 'waiting.'

When he closed his eyes he saw (green) and (yellow) and _red_, (silver-white) and (orange-and-blue) and bright steel painted across the insides of the lids, but he was well-trained and weary, and did not let that keep him awake.

Precisely three hours later, Talon woke. He remembered no dreams, but it had been a very long time since he had. It was possible his mental configuration was inhuman enough to function without access to a dream state; more likely he dreamed but did not recall. So long as no impairment of function resulted, it did not matter.

He tasted blood, but if he had bitten his tongue or cheeks in his sleep the wound had healed without any other trace.

Talon performed his daily exercise routine before he turned on the radio. Understanding human voices was not difficult, even if he could not himself speak very well; similarly, his stretches and strength training were so rote he could do them while drugged beyond the capacity even to comprehend and obey orders, and had done so. He could have combined the two activities without damage to either. Doing so was, however, at his discretion.

Talon did not get bored. That capacity had been beaten out of him in childhood. A weapon was not useful if it could not be left sheathed, if it grew _impatient_. It was a liability. So Talon did not grow impatient.

But he did efficiently disperse his activities over the span of time allotted them.

His mission had attracted so much attention that it was still the focus of news broadcasts even in the absence of any further actual news. The White House spokesman was currently dwelling on the bravery of the Secret Service members who had died in last night's 'attack.'

None of them had had the chance to be brave. He had killed them before they knew he was there. (That much, at least, had gone right.) Brave guards would have been no less dead, and no less failures at their duty. The spokesman must have some stake in the honor of the protective detail. Talon flipped into a handstand on the edge of the cot and began doing more pushups.

Upper body strength was easier to build since reaching adolescence, but expectations had also increased. Training was always a valid use of time. Nothing less than perfection was acceptable, for the Owl who flew with Death in his claws.

Killing Wilson within the available time frame had been within his capabilities. Subduing him without killing him had not. Mission parameters required the President to survive to appreciate the Owl's message.

An assassin who had been unmasked and withdrawn under fire was not terrifying.

His master would probably not claim the kill after all, now. It was imperfect.

If the abandoned cape and mask led to his weakness being associated with the Court's name, there would be reprisal.

Weaknesses were not permitted.

But the mission was _completed_.

He held to that until the White House Spokesman finished and another man cut in, much more cheerful, and said a great deal of nothing before handing the conn, _"Over to you, Bonnie._"

Bonnie was a woman speaking with loud, precise emphasis over jumbled background noise. Probably a crowd of people, not angry, not calm.

"_Although an inside source reveals that little Joey remains in critical condition, the initial surgery was a success—"_

Talon's hearing went…grey, the woman's words fuzzing away to meaningless blurts of sound. He had landed at the end of the cot in a crouch when his focus faltered, but if he had fallen full-length on the floor with a broken wrist he probably would not have noticed.

Joseph Wilson was alive.

He had cut the boy's throat—

(_green eyes yellow hair red blood_)

—and it had not been enough. He had been interrupted. Distracted. The stroke had gone awry.

The surgery was a success.

Joseph Wilson had survived.

The mission was not completed.

He had failed.

He had _failed._

Talon had not always been perfect, of course. He had a learning curve, just like anyone. New skills had to be acquired and practiced. This was _understood_. Errors and failures during training were only moderately penalized, unless they recurred. Errors had also occurred in the field; those did not matter so long as the objective was achieved without significant loss of resource or face. He was _good_ at improvising around unexpected challenges; tactical flexibility, something Owlman took pride in, especially when there was some mad 'hero' involved and it inevitably became necessary. Ideally he would not _need_ to be flexible, but in a perfectly controlled world he would not be needed at all.

This was not his first tactical retreat, nor the first fight he had not won, not when the world held super-strong Amazons and flying aliens and masters of the martial arts who had been training for lifetimes. Owlman could beat him, of course, always. Being among the world's deadliest assassins was not the same as being its most powerful fighter. He had made mistakes before this, and been overpowered and, despite all of his and his master's efforts, still persistently possessed flaws, though they had grown harder and harder to detect over the years.

Talon had not always been perfect. But he had never _failed_.

Not like this.

His hand was shaking. He stilled it.

He found himself relieved that several days would pass before he could stir from hiding. His master's fury would vent itself on other targets and have cooled somewhat by the time he had Talon once again in his reach.

Or the delay might give him more time to plan the inevitable punishment.

Talon stayed by the radio, adjusting it to find another news station any time the one he was monitoring abandoned the story. 'Critical condition' meant the boy might still die. If he did, the mission would still be complete, despite Talon's errors. Punishment would ensue, but only the standard kind. Not the unknowable wrack of _failure_.

All was not lost.

As he waited for the news that Joseph Wilson had died, he found himself thinking of the boy's father, who had leapt at him and driven him back, blade against blade.

He realized, after a time, that what had so unsettled him in that fight, beyond the fact that it should not have occurred at all or that his opponent had been stronger than he should have been, or the irritation of knowing that he could have won if he had been permitted to kill, was that Slade Wilson had looked at him. _At_ him. Had understood what he was, demanded to know who sent him, and still his rage and vengeance had been focused on Talon. Always before, that focus had come only from people who mistook him for a murderer, for someone who cared whether their loved ones lived or died. Those who, at the very least, believed he could be begged or bargained with. Those who knew him for the claw at the end of the Owl's long reach had looked through him, to the will that moved his blades.

But Wilson had looked at _him._ Torn at his mask as though there was an identity underneath to discover. That one blue eye had been demanding, and the empty pit that he _knew_ was blind had seemed to drill into him deeper still.

The orange soldier held Talon responsible for what he'd done. He'd looked at his face as though he intended to remember it.

There was a mirror in the safehouse, mounted beside the plumbing fixtures to facilitate the application of disguises and confirm that all bloodspatter evidence had been wiped away before venturing outside. Talon found himself staring into it as the radio nattered on about the manhunt for him currently raging outside.

The feeling of being _seen_ still clung to him, heavy and sticky.

His eyes were a darker blue than the one that remained to the swordsman. Without a mask Talon's face was a stranger's, but when he looked at it the way he would at a target—looked into blue eyes the way he had into Joseph's green as he held him down—he saw…

He looked away. There was nothing to see.

"—out of danger," said the radio. "Yes, that's right, I'm happy to announce that Joey Wilson's life is no longer in danger. His condition is stable and doctors anticipate recovery."

So, then.

His hands did not begin shaking again.

He had failed. Thrice over, and utterly.

His punishment would be pain. That was…unimportant. Life was pain. Nothing had ever equaled the hours his body had spent remaking itself after the electrum was first activated.

But he had failed. Thrice over, and utterly.

Owlman had no use for a tool that failed him.

There had been other Talons. Since Gotham first rose beside the sea, the Court had brooded in its shadows, and for almost as long, there had been Talon to enforce its will and secrecy. He was not the first. He would not be the last.

Not the last. And to be discarded…perhaps it was only death. But he did not _know_.

Pain was known, and negligible. The other punishments—darkness, silence, or their opposite, trapped in overwhelming noise and light and caged under the eyes of every Owl there was, until he longed to be buried alive again for the solitude of it. Those had weight. (An emptiness under his breastbone that had nothing to do with hunger, carved open to the world by Wilson's nothing-eye. His ribs spreading like unfurling wings.)

Pain was nothing; fear was everything, and he feared the Owl more than any mouse or bat had ever feared its natural predator. It was the only weakness he was permitted.

Once, years ago, while he was still small but long after he had stopped trying to be anything but what he was, he had hesitated before striking a blow home. Seconds only, and only because the prey was another servant of the Court, and yet had fought against him for her life rather than accepting her fate, and it had—surprised him. The King had bound his Talon at the wrists and told him to run, and bid his Court to hunt.

Very few of them were skilled. But he could not fight them, and he could not run forever. They brought him to bay, in the end. The tearing of dogs and the crack of the guns. The horn.

He could have killed them all. Especially the dogs. Bonds were easily slipped or broken; there had been enough of a lead to improvise a spear, and if he had taken to the trees they would not have known how near he was until they were dying. Might even have kicked some half of them to death, still bound. But his orders had been to flee, not to fight, and bare bones had shown white through his blood before his master called the dogs off. Cut the rope from his wrists and told him, _never fail me again._

He could not run forever. He knew that very well.

Yet….

If he had been certain what the punishment would be, he would almost certainly have returned for it. Whatever agony or death had waited. But the _blankness_ of this, the unguessed-at horror of what punishment might ensue for this unpardonable sin…it was more terrifying, of course, but more than that, it forced him to _think_. He could not simply fold that in him which felt fear aside and submit when his mind kept clawing over all he knew of his master's taste and temper, trying to guess. Trying to know.

It could always be made worse. Talon knew that deeper than his bones. And yet the dread unknown of _this_ punishment, which awaited him, eclipsed the world and all its uncertainties. Whatever awaited him, if he tried to escape and was caught it would be worse, and yet.

With his hands unbound, if he turned and killed every hound that snapped at his heels—

If he just—

If—

The hollow under his breastbone screamed and the twin terrors of twin uncertainties screamed and Talon began to feel that in any moment he might scream, too. (How long since he had screamed? He had been much, much younger than Joey Wilson, certainly, with his high, clear voice and his childish trust that if he cried out help would come to him _and it had—_)

He sliced into his own throat, sharp, one-handed, parting skin and blood vessels and trachea and vocal cords with the same gauntlet that had been used to gut an overeager guard during his retreat. Caught himself against the wall as the abrupt lack of oxygen to his brain robbed him of equilibrium, and then as the tissues flowed back together, stripped off that glove, then the other, and peeled himself out of Talon's weightless tunic. By the time he stood naked, he could have spoken again, had he had anything to say. But the urge to scream had passed.

He felt very calm.

Tactical analysis: Since there had not been intended to be any surviving witnesses, Talon had been expected to handle his own extraction. Due to the manhunt, his absence from the Court would not be considered suspicious for another three days. He gathered everything that could be considered useful from the safehouse, pulled a hood over his face, and slipped out into the night.

Talon ran.

* * *

There was an art to getting out of the city without being seen. If all he had needed was speed, he could have found a car to steal that would not be reported quickly enough to risk being run down, but between traffic cameras and wherever he abandoned the vehicle, that would leave a trail to follow. He slipped over roofs and through abandoned industrial areas all night, until he was well into Maryland, then around dawn broke into a house that had clearly been closed up while the occupants were on vacation, and slept part of the day on the sofa in an attic study, one ear tuned to the sound of an opening door.

The mail arrived around ten in the morning, waking him, and after determining he was still alone in the house Talon hesitated to sleep again. Subtlety meant hiding during the day, and hiding meant time to fill, and his life had taught him to sleep when he could, but he had slept ten hours in two days and felt well-rested enough to make him restless, even if he had not been strung tight with running for his (freedom) (wings)—life.

The study was a narrow space, all bare wood and sloping roof, which limited the height of the bookshelves lining the walls, with maps and postcards tacked between the rafters. A bird feeder hung outside the single round window, though he had not yet seen any birds. The sofa was faded green velour, with carved wooden feet and a patch on one arm, where the fabric had gone beyond worn-shiny and split open. The only new thing in the room seemed to be the padded black desk chair, which swiveled.

It seemed like a good place to work. Not optimally efficient, but…effective enough. He wondered what it would be like, as he looked at the desk that was cluttered with papers and pens and what must be personal mementos, since they made no sense to him, wondered what it would be like to have a space that belonged only to you. He lingered behind the chair, trying to imagine it was his.

He couldn't. The owner was a cypher to him; he could not even have confidently assigned the person an age or gender, and yet their personality was stamped as clearly into the space as Owlman's was into the Cave beneath Wayne Manor. The same sense of _ownership_ that had caused him to _want_ made it impossible to pretend he _had_. He could not even imagine what a space with him stamped into it would be like. Empty, he supposed.

The ache that had started in his chest…he could no longer say when…it pulled, as though it was a hook and not a hollow.

He thought of a word. A word he had once cared deeply about. A name he had been so proud of.

_Grayson_.

He was no one's son. He wasn't grey, not really, not in any way that showed. But he flew, even now, and Grayson meant him. That was his.

_Richard Grayson._

He had been Talon since he was small enough to slither between the bars of the alligator enclosure at the Gotham zoo, to kill one and prove his adequacy. Since before that, when the Court had first massed identical around him in their round white masks and taught him the pain that nothing else had ever equaled, the pain that meant all his wounds were nothing ever since, because they would not last and the suffering of them was only in his mind. Since the Owl with hooked beak had gripped him by the throat and whispered, _silence_. He had been Talon almost forever, and Talon belonged to the Court of Owls. So it had always been, as long as Gotham had stood.

Talon looked to the Court. And the Court looked to its King. So it was, even if it had not always been.

Yet Talon would not be running. So he must not _be_ Talon anymore.

_Richard_…it meant nothing to him. He had no memory of ever being addressed as _Richard;_ it was a stranger's name, the name of a dozen men he had killed. Not him.

But _Grayson—_he could remember a warm, booming voice, carrying across the golden circle in the heart of darkness where he first flew, before he'd ever felt the tug of his jesses. _Grayson_ had about the same shape and weight to it as _Talon;_ it would fit cleanly into the space in his thoughts where his name belonged.

Not thinking about the source of the name was old habit, easy to keep even now. They did not matter. Even if he had gotten it from them, at first, from those who made him before the Court remade him, it wasn't theirs to take back at the turn of a coin. This was…his.

The urge to run pulled at him again, more strongly than ever, because _fuck_ if he was going to let that be taken again, and the _want_ drilled through him and left him rocking, laying a palm against the map of Southeast Asia tacked to the wall above the shabby sofa, a green smudge labeled _Bukit Tiga Puluh National Park_ showing between his spread fingers. They looked strange, without their glove, without the claws that should have been carving divots into the surface of the map.

…he knew where it would be difficult to find him.

Six weeks later, a few thousand miles away, the man who was no longer Talon crossed the border into Canada on foot, in the middle of a nature reserve, entirely bypassing the standard checkpoints. There was no one to see.

He had two tarpaulins, a small tent, a single blanket, a large box of matches, and two knives.

If he was careful, he wouldn't have to see another human being until he walked out again.

* * *

Grayson picked his way through the trees, branch to branch. In his first day he had found eight birds' nests, tiny delicate blue and pale-speckled eggs heavy and rich on his tongue, in a way he knew meant they were high in calories. They were tiny, though. If he lived on eggs, there would probably be no birds here next year, and he would miss the sound of them.

That was why he'd decided against hunting them, too, even though they made themselves so irresistibly obvious with their loud voices. That, and they were so _very_ small. Barely a mouthful, under all the feathers. And when he looked at the—(_robins_)—orange-fronted ones, his chest hurt.

(_My little red Robin. Dickiebird. Love._)

He _shouldn't_ miss her. It had been…years. Their exact measure had been lost in the dark pit of his early training, but he thought he had lived about twice as long in the Court as in the circus. He had allowed himself in stolen moments to ache for the place itself, for the lights and the smell and the solid, wrinkly skin of an elephant under his hand_, _but not for her. For them. They had lied, and they had betrayed, and that was the nature of people, but he wouldn't forgive it. Not in them. Not when they had promised to always give everything for him, and given him away for so little.

…Slade Wilson had cared about _his_ sons. Even the orange-breasted bird who had caught him with his hand in its nest had screamed and beaten him with its wings and torn at his face. Very like Wilson, in fact.

No more eggs.

Now, he was tracking a rabbit. Many of his hunting skills had first been practiced on rabbits, before he was trusted with real prey, and he still remembered the look of a rabbit trail. This one dived into a stand of thorny vines, and when he circled carefully, did not seem to come out.

A burrow, then. One end of it. He found a hidden place, safely downwind, and sank into a crouch to wait.

After some eighteen minutes' stillness, a small, twitching nose emerged from the brambles. Wary dark eyes blinked around the seemingly empty sunlit patch of sward. A dust-brown rabbit emerged slowly and settled itself to grazing at the edge of the bed of clover that this burrow was probably positioned to take advantage of. Slowly, the small creature crept forward as it browsed, long ears constantly in motion to catch the sound of a lurking hunter, ready constantly to bolt. Most of its attention trained on the threat of open sky over its head, waiting for the rustle of pinions that was a stooping hawk.

An Owl's wings made no sound, and whatever he was or might become, that skill remained. The moment he judged it was far enough from safety that he could kill it even if detected—he would not repeat his error with the Wilson boy again so soon—he leapt from his hiding place. A single stab into the base of its skull, and it was dead, instantly, before it knew more than a moment's fear. Grayson tugged his knife free, picked up his prey, and paused. A smudge of red across his palm. This was his first kill since he had turned his back on Talon. For the first time since he was a child, the blood on his hands was not human.

It didn't feel any different.

He turned the limp thing over in his hand. It reminded him uneasily of the one time he had been required to kill an infant, and he shut that away hastily. Not being particularly human anymore was not quite enough make him comfortable with cannibalism, and this was a rabbit. Just a rabbit.

Its ears were impossibly soft.

Irrelevant. Back to the campsite to turn the corpse into food. He'd never cleaned a kill before, but he had eviscerated several people, and he'd had flaying training, though it had never been called into use for anything larger than a hand. He expected the skills were transferable.

This expectation turned out to be broadly correct. Precision with a knife and practical knowledge of anatomy served him well enough. The rabbit's skin tore only once in the course of peeling it away, and once it was a headless, furless piece of meat, he no longer felt that odd hesitation.

Cooking proved to be more difficult. No applicable training existed. Eating it raw was a possibility, but one which he discarded. Boiling it would have been safe, but he had not stolen any pans on his way northwest. In the end, he spitted the thing on a straight, green branch, cleaned of bark, and turned it slowly just above the fire until it seemed brown enough.

Hot meat was—startling. The burns on his lips were the result of impatience, and easily ignored until they vanished, but the taste was…good. Not as rich as the eggs had been, but sharper.

He concluded that this method was acceptable, but he would have to learn to do it faster, or spend all his time hunting, butchering, and cooking.

He staked out that burrow until the rabbits learned it was not safe, which happened surprisingly quickly—he had had ambush sites for _humans_ that had lasted longer, and humans could talk, though admittedly the patrons of dive bars probably kept far worse tabs on one another than a herd of rabbits. They probably smelled one another's deaths on the grass. When rabbit traffic dropped off, he found another trail and set up another trap.

On the sixth day of hunting, he found a fox in his blind. They stared at one another for one and a half heartbeats before the fox, recognizing a far larger predator, dived into the brush. Instinctively, Talon's knife left his hand. The fox stumbled, twitched. Lay still.

Grayson stared at the thick rust-orange tail with its white tip, then moved forward and dug the corpse out of the brush. He needed his knife back, if nothing else.

That day he learned why carnivores were not traditionally part of the human diet. He finished it anyway.

It might as well have died for a reason.

Perhaps he should figure out how to fish.

He lay on his back on top of his tarpaulin groundcloth that night, with the fire banked to a soft red glow, staring up at the sky, where the clouds had begun to break up and reveal small swatches of stars. Every so often, the flutter of bat's wings became more than a sound, when one swooped across the stars, devouring its fill of flying insects. (He'd always liked bats. Peaceful, unassuming creatures. Flew alone, roosted together. There used to be a colony in Owlman's inner keep, before the king lost patience with bat shit on the equipment and had them all killed. He didn't give that job to Talon, though. He'd been grateful.) The pinch of mosquito bites along his limbs was oddly comforting, the tiny pain sealing him inside his skin.

This was real, he thought at the stars and bats and biting things. He had failed, and run, and not yet been caught. He should be terrified. He was the rabbit, now, after all his years as a hunter among men. And he _was_ terrified, whenever he thought of what would happen to him if he was caught; he trembled in the place down inside where he had learned to bury his weakness long ago, and terror nearly blotted out all thought. So he had not thought; all these weeks he had merely stayed in motion. He was good at that, after all.

He had focused on his mission of getting over the border, out of the country where the unsettlingly accurate line drawing of his face was still running on every television once a day, the country where the two men who would most like to see him gutted had their power bases. And once he was here, he had thought only of food and drink and safety.

But he was running out of missions to give himself. He did not need much in the way of food or sleep or comfort; he had more than provided for himself already. This was—enough. The forest couldn't be _his_, not really, but the little space of his camp and his fire belonged to no one else, either, and that was better, for now. This was…

Silent as death, the rendingly-familiar shape of an owl cut across his patch of stars, snatched a bat in its talons, and was gone into the dark.

Grayson's breath stopped for long enough to make even him notice the discomfort.

Stupid, he told himself, filling his lungs. It's just a bird. It has to eat, just like the bats. The fox. Like you. Just like you.

He kept his eyes closed until his breath came normally again, and then let himself watch the stars. The clouds had crawled on and the gaps in them moved and shifted, but the sky was still there.

When winter came, he would move on. This park was not large enough, or remote enough, to live here forever, and he did not truly have the skills to make this a winter home. He did not know whether he _could_ freeze to death, and had no wish to find out empirically. And he needed to get further away. The reach of his enemies was long, and there was nowhere they could not pursue him if he was discovered, but there was no reason to make it _easy_.

He could find another forest, a more temperate or even tropical one, Sumatra even, get better gear and just—live. Like this. He wondered if he could learn to like it, peace until he died.

But he knew…no, he _wanted._ Wanting still sat uneasily on his shoulders, on one who had been Talon so long, but he wanted. He wanted the words that came so easily to other people's lips. He wanted to eat things like candy and hamburgers that he'd seen other people enjoying, wanted to know if popcorn was actually as good as he remembered, because all he could remember of the taste now was salt—more like tears than blood, but like blood greasy. He wanted…he wanted to find the people who had sold him into Owlman's keeping, and hear from their own mouths why. Whether they had regretted it. Whether they were _proud_ of the Grayson he was now. He could still do a quadruple somersault they'd taught him, although without a catcher ready to gentle him out of the spin he often wound up on the ground broken afterward. Which didn't matter; it passed. What would they think of that?

If they gave the wrong answers, maybe he would kill them. Maybe that would quiet the shaking that tried to come into his hands sometimes now, when he thought too much, the thing he thought was called _rage_.

He could stay alive out here, alone. Forever, maybe, if some of the whispers he had heard of Talons were true. But staying alive was all he'd ever been doing. He wanted to _live_.

And he was fairly sure that to do that, he would need people.

His tongue moved across the roof of his mouth. It wasn't his original tongue; that had been cut out during an early phase of his training. This was the third one, and maybe that was why words came to it slowly; it had never learned to speak the way his first one had, chattering away under the high canvas roof of the circus. But if that were the case limb injuries should have done more harm to his combat reflexes than they ever had. Probably every part of him had been carved away and replaced over the years. Maybe that made him not quite human after all, the way victims would sometimes sob, the way Arsenal and Troia and Blaze and the other young nightmares used to whisper when they thought he couldn't hear, _he's like a goddamn machine, Donna, __**Christ**_. Maybe that meant this body wasn't quite so _his_ after all.

But.

The feeling of being seen.

Run through by knowing. The Owl had always looked at him like that, when he bothered to pay attention to him at all, but being stripped to his essential components under his master's gaze had always made him feel _less_ real, not more. He was not sure what was different about what Wilson's mismatched eyes had demanded of him, because it was certainly more than the anger, but.

Being seen.

Darkness was supposed to be terrible, Grayson knew. He was part of the terror in it, and faintly he could remember long ago, when he was inside the small, warm rolling space that had been _mine-ours-home_, the dark outside the windows feeling threatening. Cruel darkness, masking crimes from sight until the murderers had fled, letting the monsters slip close enough to seize you before you had a chance to scream. (Except he had been too slow, and the boy had screamed after all, and everything had—)

But fear of the dark was one of those things he'd sloughed off when he stopped being a person the way other people were, and not one of the ones he could miss. He understood what there was to fear, but to him…

The truth was, in many ways the night was kinder than the day. It offered more places to hide; it let the sharp jagged truths that daylight would sketch out with all their cutting edges appear gently, inch by inch. For so long he had stepped out into the light only to kill and frighten and fight. So long as he was alone in it, the dark was the safest place to be.

But he could not hide forever. Not if he wanted to take back the things the Owls had stolen from him. He couldn't pass for normal, now, not for very long. It took so much work to remember to move right, to bend his face into expressions, and his one attempt at an extended conversation on his way to the border had resulted in a frightened waitress and a thick, scraped-out weariness he usually associated with too many sucking chest wounds in a short period. The idea of trying to live among people, like he was one of them, of losing himself in the mass of humanity so that his pursuers would never sift him out quickly enough to catch him before he had already moved on—terrifying. Harder than anything he had had to do to himself to survive as Talon. Harder than any of the times he had had to live through what should have been hideous death, as his body pulled its shards back together.

But he had lived his whole life afraid. He would be careful. He would run and run forever, if he had to. But he would not give up. _Mine_, he thought, his hands closing tightly at his sides, as he fixed his eyes on the fleeting, half-hidden stars. _I won't give it up again._

"My name is Richard Grayson," he told the night.

He had the sense that the night approved.

* * *

_**A/N: **Wow. For a guy who mostly doesn't talk, Greywing had a lot to say. And being a hermit is totally a valid life choice, but even as screwed up as Bruce has left him, Grayson is still a people person, in his way. He's in the Quetico Provincial Park, by the way, where it is illegal to harm live plants, or animals other than fish. Dick really, really does not care. _

_It's July by this point, but robins lay three or four successive clutches throughout the summer months; grow up fast, die young, that's how songbirds roll. Abuse symbolism? I never.  
_


	31. Climbing Ivy II

'Climbing Ivy' pt II

**_A/N:_**_ This chapter delayed due to technical difficulties, and then everybody in my house got sick, even the pets, and then gluh, and then Christmas, and it's somehow been months. Sorry. You may wish to reread part I before proceeding. At least it's long?__  
_

_Btw, Pamela Eisley in comics has slowly developed from a botanist who bred man-eating Venus Fly Traps into some kind of plant elemental in human form without ever getting a solid power-origin story, so I took a fairly free hand. Also, I've always assumed Talia's use of 'Beloved' was a literal translation of 'habibi.' I sincerely doubt the woman thinks in English._

* * *

"He _is _very charming, huh?" Pam asked, eyebrows high. Watched Talia al Ghul for the faintest signs of guilt, or shame. _Habibi,_ she'd whispered. "You still love him."

Challenge in the foreigner's squared jaw. "And if I do?"

"Then I have to ask what exactly we're doing calling each other allies. What you're really doing in Gotham. Why you'd invite me into your order, whether it _really_ had anything to do with the rainforests at all."

"_Pam_!" Harley exclaimed, scandalized.

And sure, that probably wasn't fair. Ra's was the one who'd made the offer, if nothing else. But Talia was all structure and line, carefully maintained, like a topiary garden, and something like this wouldn't just live wild and uncontrolled in a mind like that, not unless she _let _it, which meant like kudzu or some other invasive vine it had probably snaked its way into everything, and Pam hadn't trusted her from the start and this was a _damn_ good reason. This would explain everything.

"She's an idiot," Ivy announced, rage writhing in her chest. She had her feet braced apart, toes dug into the earth and arms crossed, and the grape vines were beginning to boil up around her, smothering the trellises and snaking their way up every wall and fence and lamppost.

As the zone under her influence expanded, their fellow patrons drew back, a few of them frightened, more of them looking judgmentally at Talia in the assumption she had committed some villainy. It was possible someone in the Owl's pocket would come looking to arrest Pam in a little while, but she didn't care. "All that bastard has to do is smile at her and she'll betray us."

"I will _not_," Talia growled.

She had a firm stance of her own, one that suddenly looked like a fighter's root. As far as _she_ was concerned, Pam had probably just challenged her, questioning her honor—and all three of them _knew_ that if Talia got past the plants, Pam would go down hard. Powers told for a lot, and she was stronger than her build suggested, but her hand-to-hand was nothing special. Harley could take her nine falls out of ten, being both barehanded. Talia was a _ninja_.

The ninja's hands had curled into fists. "I will not. He has my love, not my loyalty."

"You think you can keep those apart? _Really?_" Pam hissed. "You think if he makes you promises, you'll be able to tell which ones are lies? Love makes you stupid."

"I will not let myself be used," Talia said firmly. Grape vines, thickening with every minute, writhed steadily nearer her, and she did not recoil. She was still holding the popsicle stick, and if Pam pumped out much more power it might sprout. _That _might scare her. It was almost tempting; anything to get an actual uncontrolled _reaction._ "But the heart loves as it will."

"If you stop feeding it, it'll go away eventually," Pam growled. "Whatever you loved was a lie all along."

Talia shook her head. "There is a great man in him," she said. "Buried under the rage and pride. I can see it still, when I look at him. If he would only turn his back on the dark path he walks, he could be the best of us."

Breath hissed between Pam's teeth. "And if penguins had actual wings maybe they could fly. 'Greatness' isn't worth anything in someone who wouldn't spit on you if you were burning."

"I cannot simply _stop_ loving."

"You can stop being stupid about it. What will it take for you to understand that he's a monster, and he's never going to change?"

"He _could_ change." I could change him, she meant, uncompromising dark eyes full of passion in a way Pam was surprised to learn they could be, and that stupid, self-destructive conviction that you could remake a monster with your love always made her want to _break_ something.

"You're nothing but a tool to him," she ground out. Despite not knowing anything about their relationship, the details or how they'd come to know each other. She knew enough of Wayne, and she knew the sorrow she'd seen in the other woman's eyes, deeper than just wanting what she couldn't have. "That's not going to change. Ever."

"_Pam._" Harley cut in, punctuating the hard-edged address with a firm hand on her shoulder. "Stop. Talia has the right to hope. Everyone deserves a chance, remember? Even him. If Talia wants to be the one to keep giving him chances, then that is her _choice._"

Pamela clenched her jaw, pulled free. "She's too good for him," she hissed, and then rounded more directly on Talia. "You hear me? I don't like you, but he doesn't deserve to kiss your feet."

What Talia would have done with this declaration was never revealed, because the air was split by a scream.

People were always screaming at an amusement park, often in true terror as all their instincts mistakenly informed them of imminent death by collision or falling, but this was different. This was not the sound of thrill-riding or even a burst of involuntary fear, but dread and horror, warning to others just as much as panic for one's self, and within seconds, it was not alone.

While worried murmuring broke out between the other patrons in the grape garden, the three women turned as one to peer down the decoratively wooded slope; Harley gave a scoff of frustration almost at once, and turned to scramble up the nearest arbor, to make up for her lack of height. Squinted down the hillside at the lamplit square below.

"Is that…a flaming sword?" Talia asked, as the bright blade flickered into view between narrow treetrunks.

Harley nodded, leaning far out to the right to see around the screen of trees and the kitschy little grey-stone chapel parked among them. "It is. Wrong color and style to be Firefly pulling a rescue, and he's out of town anyway."

"Azrael," Pam sighed, her anger shredded away in the face of emergency. "I knew the Order couldn't hold him forever." _This_ was a Gotham night out. A hero's work was never done. And never had the courtesy to restrict itself to normal working hours. She'd _known_ she should have brought some field gear.

Shared madness was the glue that held the Gotham Circus together. Anyone who doubted it could watch Pamela Eisley, who had never fought a day in her life before the night that she'd died and come back with every green thing in a hundred feet singing in her head, slipping her nice night-out flats back on to run _toward_ the sound of screaming. Not even because it was expected, or the price for acceptance in her new family. Not even because it helped with the knot of frustrated powerlessness that had formed in her chest long ago and expanded to Gordian proportions after her near-murder. Because it was _right._

Harlene Quinzel pulled a slightly crumpled black mask from her pocket and smoothed it over her face. One must observe the formalities. Glanced from one of her companions to the other; the readiness in Ivy's eyes, the nod of deference from Director al Ghul, as guest to host. Smiled, steel and sunshine. "Let's go."

They moved. Ivy and Harlequin briefed their ally on the opponent as they cut through the trees. Her father had some history with the Order of Saint Dumas, long ago, but no Azrael had been active east of Istanbul in over a century. Especially not _this _kind. "The most important things to remember," Harley summarized, as they charged downhill, avoiding the congestion of panicked crowds scrambling the other way by bypassing the crowded paths entirely, "are that he thinks he's doing the work of God, as a literal avenging angel, and that if we can get the suit off him, he'll lose most of his power."

"Is it magical?" Talia asked, as she swung one-handed around a small tree that had loomed in her path, giving herself an extra burst of speed with the centripetal force. The chapel blew past to their right. Pam had found glossy dark ivy twining over the earth and around some of the trees, no doubt planted for decorative purposes, and added it to the ropes of grapes trailing behind her. Nothing like ivy in a fight, when she didn't have time to grow anything _special_.

She wrapped a strand of it around herself as she went, curling comfortably along her limbs and up her neck, forsaking its roots to live off of her strength for now, and fanning a mask of layered leaves over her face. The Owl was fairly sure he knew who Ivy was, but that didn't mean she needed to abandon subtlety completely.

"No, it's…the conditioning that was used to overwrite his identity is rooted in perception in a way that…" Harley seemed to realize that running down a hill with a fight only seconds away was not the right time for a psychology lecture. "He can't access most of his abilities if he isn't dressed as Azrael."

Talia nodded curt understanding, pulled a knife from her elegant boot, and then they burst from the woods and vaulted-scrambled-up-leapt the chain-link fence into the terrace where Azrael, once Champion of the Holy Order of Saint Dumas, resplendent in blue and silver armor, was advancing on a long-haired young couple covered in tattoos, who had run out of space to retreat, and were each trying the shield the other with their bodies.

Talia went low. Harlequin went high. Ivy stepped out of her shoes again and held position near the fence and sent her vines to draw the sprawled bodies of earlier victims carefully out of the line of fire, while the long-haired couple fled without a second glance.

Good, she hated rescuing people too stupid to live. No one seemed to be dead yet, though most of them were dying. Bastard had been _drawing it out _again. The only _good_ thing about the flaming sword, and this was a very mixed blessing, was that it tended to cauterize, so only a few of the casualties had serious bleeding she had to try to stem.

_Stem. _Augh, Ed's puns had colonized her brain. Maybe she should get out of Gotham while she had the chance.

Out on the pavement, Azrael avoided Talia's low slash with his usual preternatural reflexes, but in consequence failed to notice Harley's much less threatening presence until her feet were about to make contact with his face, and the first blow of the encounter sent him stumbling back a step.

Harley flipped back away from that and landed, facing Azrael with his targets at her back, and Talia moved to take advantage of the opening. She landed her blow, this time, but the knife slashed open his surcoat and skittered off his armoured side, and one of his great fists lashed through the gap the lunge had left in her guard and sent her flying back, almost directly into a middle-aged woman with a slash to the chest, who seemed to be going into shock.

The gauntlet that had done the striking remained extended toward her, even as she caught herself, awkward and off-balance to avoid doing more damage to the victim, even as Azrael seemed to turn his attention back to Harley. Ivy knew what _that_ meant. Her shout of warning came just in time, as a quarter-size replica of Azrael's flaming broadsword flew from the maniac's left wrist, straight through the place where Talia's throat had been a moment before.

It still pinned her to the front wall of a candy store by her designer jacket, and possibly part of her shoulder, but Pam didn't have time to worry about that because evacuation was still ongoing. All the self-mobile targets had gotten away now, except a woman clinging to the hand of her half-conscious…brother, judging by the resemblance, whose intestines were only prevented from spilling out by a thin layer of scorched tissue, as he was borne toward safety. The fragile cases like him took excruciating care. Gently sliding the woman on whom Talia had almost landed across the cobblestones on a web of vines went all too slowly, but jarring her with rush might make the difference between life and death. The only good news was that Azrael had lost interest in mere victims now that he'd encountered resistance, and that once again depended slightly on your definition of _good._

Ivy hissed between her teeth as she split her attention between the hundreds of individual stems under her control and the scene in front of her real eyes. The mad knight had both hands on his sword again, and was scything it toward the woman who'd kicked him in the head and hadn't had the common sense to run away afterward.

"The demon Hellequin!" he bellowed. "We meet again!"

"Great, he can talk today," Pam muttered. Actually, she preferred it when the Azrael personality was coherent enough to be really annoying; she always felt worse about beating on the man when he came across more as a brainwashing victim than an asshole. Not that he wasn't always both.

Either way, though, he was dangerous. And he'd recognized Harley in spite of her civvies—maybe it was the mask, maybe it was the distinctive kick to the face. Maybe it was the animated plants in the background; everyone knew Ivy and Harlequin tended to come as a set. He wasn't coming close enough to Pam's side of the terrace for the trees to take a stab at him; he probably knew she was there.

"What kind of evil do you think you're vanquishing at an _amusement park?_" the tiny clown demanded, cartwheeling out of reach. It was a good thing she hadn't worn the skirt.

The reply was garbled, but started somewhere around 'you' and meandered over to something involving Satan worship. Since the evil monks who'd created him hadn't intended for their Champion to ever select his own targets, Azrael's victimology when he rampaged tended to be all over the place. Harley had theories about the associations that pointed him in specific directions, but Pam didn't really care. She just wished he would _stop._

Good luck with that, as her father would have said.

Harlequin took a blunt pommel-blow to the gut soon after that, when she overextended herself going for his helmet in hopes of disengaging the System, and was out for several nerve-wracking seconds. Talia stepped up with her boot-knife and the shortsword that had nearly killed her, which she must have pried out of the wall, and engaged him in what seemed, from the glimpses Pam caught, to be a duel of blades worthy of an Errol Flynn film, although with less gaily clashing steel and more chance of someone being cleft in twain. (Cleaved? Cloven?) Every split-second dodge seemed to enrage him further. Harley recovered enough to go back to splitting his concentration. Talia wasn't favoring her left shoulder; good.

Instead, she was trying to engage her opponent in a doctrinal dispute vis-à-vis his name—presumably in hopes that poking holes in his delusions would throw him off, but Azrael was not really equipped for comparative theology. Wasn't made to cope with abstracts. He was nothing more than a malfunctioning pattern seared into a human brain by heartless men who wanted a weapon. If he'd been a little more sane, he would have been more of a threat. Owlman was worse, in a lot of ways, because he was smarter, even though he wasn't nearly as fast or as strong.

Still, even more than the first Talon, no one ever fought Azrael alone. Not unless there was no other choice. He'd nearly killed Crocodile a few years ago, when he'd volunteered as rearguard, and Waylon would have the scars forever.

Her ivy passed the last of the wounded into the hands of people she assumed to be EMTs, from the pressure feedback she was getting from the grass—eventually she'd engineer a plant capable of sight; until then she'd have to make do—and Pam shifted her attention to weaving woody barriers over every exit, thick enough to slow Azrael down. The gaps between buildings. The doors into them. Limited space wasn't ideal for evasion-based fighting, but the plaza was large enough, Harley was a good climber, and above all they _had_ to contain him. If he got downhill to the paramedics and survivors, and whoever else was out there, and hurt anyone else…well. Protection was always the priority. Everything else came second.

Talia seemed to grasp the necessity of containment, and had helped Harley herd and bait him repeatedly back toward the center of the open space, every time he turned his attention to one of the narrowing ways out. A short gash just below the ninja's collarbone was oozing blood; the broadsword must be running low on fuel. Harley wasn't visibly injured, yet, but her expression was growing grim.

_Go, go, go, _Pam urged her vines. Thirty seconds, and they'd have the area secured. She had to trust they could last another thirty seconds.

Talia al Ghul's two blades caught Azrael's broadsword in a solid crossed guard that still staggered her backward a step. Harlequin threw all her weight into the back of Azrael's knee and just barely saved Talia from getting her chest carved open like a turkey. The salvaged shortsword licked out into the narrow gap at the joint of Azrael's shoulder, and came away bloody. The brainwashed knight bellowed in outrage and nearly broke her skull. Talia ducked by a hair, and a steel-booted kick found her side.

Harlequin seized that moment to drive a kick of her own into the inside of the only leg he still had on the ground, and in spite of the armour that protected the joint from snapping, almost anyone else would have hit the ground like a felled tree. Azrael grunted, swung his weight with the momentum, and got both feet under him again, stomping his heel a bare inch from Harley's ankle as she rolled hastily away. He always was far too fast for such a huge man.

Fighting someone like Azrael without decent weapons—or, in Harley's case, any weapons at all—was foolhardy. Relying on a partner you'd never fought alongside before was worse. Talia and Harlequin had held him for nearly three minutes, and it was possible they might have eventually worn him down enough to lay him out and strip his armor, somehow, before either of them went down for good. More likely, they wouldn't.

But now Ivy was free to join in, and Azrael hadn't even realized she had him completely surrounded.

Vines _moved._

Talia instinctively retreated when the earth under her feet lashed out, but Harlequin held her ground, ducking and rolling and _not falling back,_ splintering Azrael's concentration until he was so tangled to the waist in grapes and ivy that he could not advance at all, and then she retreated a little, out of his reach, as they crawled higher, around his chest and shoulders and arms.

"Ludovic," Harlequin said, still catching her breath, and Azrael stiffened.

"_Silence!_" he snarled. Almost he seemed afraid.

Talia, standing ready a few yards back, narrowed her eyes. Pam, though, had seen this before. She waited, concentrating on holding him in place. A gorilla would have been easier. An _elephant _would have been easier.

"Ludovic," the tiny masked woman cajoled, while the vines tangled around Azrael's arms, tightening by the second. "You know who you are. You _know_ nobody here deserved to die."

Ludovic Valley's breath hissed furiously through his teeth. It was obvious he didn't agree.

Harlequin pursed her lips, kept her big blue eyes locked on his slitted visor. "What was done to you was wrong. The brothers who betrayed the Order by doing it have already been punished. You don't _need_ to fight anymore. Let go. You're more than the System, Ludovic. You're stronger than Azrael. Think of Jean-Paul. He looks forward to visiting you every day. He loves you. You don't have to vanquish anything to be worthy of that. Just be his father."

For a second it looked like she might have broken through to whatever small part of him hadn't been poisoned by all the years of secret programming and repressed memories of murder. His face and its expression were hidden, of course, but he fell still, and then his hand on the hilt of the flaming sword came open.

It seared through the base of the vines binding his right arm as it dropped, making Ivy cringe—ivy vines couldn't experience such a sensation as pain, but they knew _damage_, and to Pam with her human nervous system that meant _hurting_—until with a roar he tore himself free of the weakened bonds on that arm, backhanded Harlequin into the nearest wall, snatched the weapon up again, and hacked his way free of the rest. Talia darted forward to intercept him, but the force with which his blade met hers knocked her flying across the square. Even as Azrael charged toward Harlequin, he fired his last gauntlet-blade at Ivy, finally recognized as a threat. She dove aside.

_Safe. _But at what cost?

"Demon, I will cut out your blandishing _tongue!_" the man who was not currently Ludovic Valley roared, out on the plaza, and brought his flaming sword down upon Harlequin's head. Pam lashed out with surviving vines, _too slow_, saw Harley ducking desperately, _too late,_ her masked face set into a grin of focus with blood running from the corner of her mouth but no fear, because it was madly brave _Harlequin,_ who wouldn't waste time being afraid when faced with a sword nearly as tall as herself—

_Kk-chnk._

It lodged in the plaster wall instead of Harley's skull, partly because the little heroine had ducked, but mostly because Azrael had been body-checked from behind.

"Harlequin is an entertainer," said Talia bint al Ghul, battered and emptyhanded, as she tightened her arm into a sleeper hold around the man's thick neck. "_I_ am the demon here."

Azrael heaved against the grip, going so far as to leave his sword in the wall to free both hands, but Harlequin rocketed up from the ground to half-stun him with an uppercut powered by every muscle in her body, and Pam, climbing the rest of the way to her feet, hurriedly tangled a tithe of vines to drag against every move he tried to make, as Talia (her feet barely touching the ground) tightened her choke, and after almost twice as long as it would have taken for a regular human, Azrael finally sagged into unconsciousness.

As a precaution, as soon as Talia stepped away, Ivy cocooned the toppling body entirely, until blue and silver had vanished entirely under green. They'd handed him into custody like this before; no one would be surprised.

Harlequin rustled through the leaves, prodded carefully at the intricate catches, and came away with the shining helmet. Gave it an angry look, as though it, being the face of Azrael, was personally responsible for the entire mess, wiped the surfaces she'd touched with her fingertips on her sleeve, and dropped it disgustedly on the ground. Then she dragged the back of her hand across her mouth, wiping away most of the trickle of blood and smearing cherry-pink lipstick up toward her ear.

"Okay?" Pam asked warily, coming forward as she folded the leaves back from her face. She was reasonably sure the blood was just from the inside of Harley's mouth getting cut on her teeth, probably that last time Azrael had swatted her, but there _had_ been a nasty abdominal blow earlier.

"Going to be a little sore tomorrow," Harley shrugged, rubbing the place just below the ribs where the sword-hilt had caught her. "But he didn't rupture anything. I did see it coming; he didn't get me full-force."

"Next time, don't get _hit_," directed Pam. Tried to punch her on the shoulder again, but Harley wove away, snickering, and punched _her_ instead. It didn't hurt.

"So, how did you like your Gotham City night of fun?" Harley asked Talia, eyes twinkling. "I'm sorry, this wasn't quite what I had in mind."

Talia grinned, the surprising open expression from the roller coaster multiplied by a factor of _shark_. She was still bleeding slightly in two places, but didn't seem to notice. "Invigorating. I will have to spend my free time here more often, if this is the usual result."

"Well, it's not like this _every_ time. We just have a knack for trouble. Huh, Ivy?" Harley nudged her again, and Pam rolled her eyes.

"We should probably get out of here before we wind up being asked for official statements," she said. People were drawing closer to the other side of her barriers now that the noise had died down, and she was pretty sure most of them were police.

"_Thanks, _by the way,_" _Harley said to Talia, who waved a hand in dismissal. Harley accepted that with a bright nod. If Talia was topiary, Harley was a water garden, sun on tiny dancing waterfalls and lilies scattered across still clean pools. "I'll call the Deacon," she announced. "See if he can get the Order out here before we have to let the cops in. I swear, though," she told Pam, "if they let him break out _one_ more time, I'm letting the actual authorities have him."

"He'd massacre the other prisoners," Pam answered flatly. They'd been over this a dozen times. "As soon as he improvised a mask." Even without Azrael, Ludovic Valley was a huge, strong man with excellent reflexes, but he wasn't especially a violent one. Unfortunately, Azrael tended to talk in his head, and he never seemed able to remember for long how making a simple mask could possibly do any harm.

"And if they sent him to Arkham, Owlman would snap him up and make him into one of his attack dogs," Harley agreed. "I know."

Sad, as she always was when she had to remember how corrupted her old institution was, and then she shook it off and headed toward the most climbable-looking of Pam's barricades with a bounce in her step, muttering about how Deacon Blackfire _was_ going to get the Order to let her in on Ludovic's treatment from now on, or she'd break some Templar heads. See if she didn't.

Personally, Pam was pretty sure the sick-and-twisted splinter faction of the secret society of not-the-Knights-Templar had the more upright branch riddled with moles; Azrael breaking out on his own was one thing, but the way he seemed to keep acquiring a complete set of gear almost every time was _suspicious_.

The police outside were growing steadily more numerous, but weren't yet trying very hard to get in, having learned over the past few years that she usually only closed a perimeter when breaking it could cost lives, so she thought she'd take a breather until the Order arrived, before she tried to put everything back. At least it was night, so she wouldn't be asking them to pull out of the sunlight. Plants were eager to grow, and reluctant to retreat, but she felt better about asking them to help her with things like this if she got them sufficiently out of the way afterward that people wouldn't feel the need to hack bits off them.

One of the _many_ downsides to working in the city.

Not that plants minded being cut in quite the way animals did; if the sun and water and soil remained sufficient, and the central vascular systems weren't compromised, then a lost limb or so represented mostly a loss of the resources invested in growing it, and the advantages it might have provided. Plants couldn't _hurt_ in the same way animals could, and probably that was why she kept siding with humans in a thousand little ways and the big way of _not_ being part of the fight for what was left of the Earth's wild places. That and her fear.

Inaction was a coward's choice. She _knew_ that, and yet she still…

"You fight well," said Talia.

Pam blinked. She'd noticed the other woman coming closer, prodding the unconscious knight with one toe and the cut on her upper chest with one blunt-cut but perfectly manicured nail. Had been vaguely ready to be engaged in conversation if necessary. Had _not _expected a compliment. "What?" Okay, she could managed something a little more intelligent than that: "You two and the vines did all the work."

Talia shrugged. "Effective resource management. One learns to appreciate it in a management position."

Pam rolled her lips in around her teeth and bit down; unlike Harley she hadn't reapplied her makeup after dinner, and could make all the thinky expressions she wanted without worrying about lipstick smudges that would make her look ridiculous well after she finished pulling faces. She was fairly sure the compliment was sincere. She was also pretty sure she didn't deserve it. "You saved Harley," she said, looking up. "At the end." When her vines had failed. When _Pam_ had failed.

Talia flicked a long-fingered hand. "Perhaps. Your warning saved mine, earlier. There is no debt."

_There are never any debts between friends,_ Harley would have said, but Pam had never completely believed that, and anyway, she and Talia al Ghul were definitely not friends. Pam had made very sure of that.

"And you weren't wrong about me," Talia said, more serious suddenly, as though she could read minds. "I am an idiot. But I am not a complete fool. I love, less because I cannot stop than because I cannot _bring_ myself to stop…hoping. Wishing. But I have not _trusted_ him since I was seventeen."

Their solemn expression made her dark eyes seem twice as large, and the flicker of vulnerability was back again, and suddenly her reactions made some kind of sense. Why she'd gotten so defensive, so quickly, and why she was letting Pam get away with what she'd said, now that tempers had cooled. She was _ashamed_.

But not enough to make her look down. "You may entrust yourself and yours to my honor."

Pam closed her eyes. "I believe you," she said. Because she might despise the way so many women threw themselves away on the idea of changing a man when people could only ever change themselves and most of those men saw no reason to try, because Talia might let her father exclude her from meetings and search for an appropriate male heir to marry her off to, but that didn't make her nothing.

Even if even _she_ might sometimes think it did.

Then she opened them again, because that kind of honesty at the expense of pride, after Pam had been so many levels of bitch today because of things that weren't really about Talia at all, deserved honesty in response. "I'm not joining the League of Shadows. Yet," she added hastily. "I'm honored. I am. And I _want_ to be part of what you're doing. But…I'm happy where I am."

Talia cast a long look around the ruined plaza, with its cracked plaster and bloodstains and the vines snaking across the open spaces. And flashed another smile. The rawness like turned earth was once again as gone as if it had never been. Pam always wondered how people _did_ that. "And no wonder."

"I'm actually not an adrenaline junkie," Pam said dryly. Unlike practically everyone she knew.

Talia laughed, like she thought it was a joke. Okay, maybe it had been. "But you would miss the fight."

Pam shrugged. She didn't _enjoy _fighting, not the way some people did. Spent most encounters wishing they were over already, except when she really lost her temper. But…she'd gotten invested in being a hero. In the people who had her back, and making sure she had theirs. Walking away from them… "I'd miss a lot of things."

"Well." Talia ran her fingertips along the lower edge of her chest injury in what seemed to be an unconscious thoughtful gesture, picking up traces of blood. "My father is anxious for your help, but he is old enough to have learned patience. Freedom is not our everything, but it is important. The League asks for a great deal of commitment. We would not have you come to us while your heart lies elsewhere."

Pam thought, but did not say, that that one remark made them sound more like a cult than anything she had heard previously, and that she suspected Bruce Wayne's treachery had probably impacted recruitment procedure. She'd made her choice. _Talia al Ghul_ thought her contribution to controlling a combat situation was valuable; the others relied on her, even if there hadn't been being Ella's Aunt Pam and bickering with Enigma like siblings and all the rest of it. This was home, the way her parents' cold house had never been. "You'll be fine without me, then?" she asked lightly.

"As we say in the Leafshadow Foundation," Talia replied, a wry catch to her mouth, "Life will always find a way."

Pam huffed and smiled and swept her hair back from her face, but before she could say anything Harley's face popped up over the top of the one barricade where Pam couldn't detect a police presence, and she waved. "They were already on their way, Ivy!" she called, loud enough for everyone in the general vicinity to hear. "Better clean up!"

Pam waved back in acknowledgment, and closed her mask of leaves again before flexing herself out through her fingertips and the soles of her feet (though she was fairly sure that was just a visualization aid) to start unravelling the barricades.

Except for the vines cocooning Azrael and the single plant inhabiting Pam's body, grape and ivy began to slink back up the hill and wrap themselves around anything they could find. If the amusement park people turned out to mind that their grape arbor had colonized their tiny deciduous forest, or that the trees were rather more thoroughly draped in ivy and one wall of the little decorative chapel coated in it…well, she hoped they didn't mind. The thicker vines would break normal pruning shears, now.

(It was a long-term loan of strength, as she had learned to make fortifying her sector of Robinson Park, not a genetic change; she was excruciatingly careful with those even if it had been easy to make them to adult specimens, because even though she owed these vines for helping her, that didn't mean she wanted to destroy who-knew-how-many ecosystems by carelessly releasing a species of unstoppable ivy. Humans might be the greatest threat to vegetable life, but plants were one another's main _competitors, _and in that kind of conflict it was more or less always correct to side against the invader.)

Her focus returned to her body, letting the vines carry on finding new living space without her conscious control, and Harley was only just hoisting herself to the top of the lattice even as it began to thin. She perched there for a second and then, drawing an involuntary smile from Ivy, kicked off and somersaulted twenty feet to the ground in defiance of her abdominal bruising. Still burning off the fight adrenaline. She was going to conk out on the bus before they were halfway home, Pam just knew it. Honestly. That woman.

"Ah," said Talia. With an intonation that implied _Aha._

Not gloating, but _knowing,_ and she looked from Harley, as she stuck the landing, to the suddenly apprehensive Pam, and gave an equally knowing smile.

Dammit.

_Takes one to know one, _Pam thought, surprised to find herself able to be wry. Sometimes bad karma caught up faster than it had any right to do. Pam watching Talia watch Wayne. Talia watching Pam watch Harlequin. _Turn about is fair play, after all._

Harley was good at seeing through people. The only reason she'd never noticed what an idiot Pam was about her was that she'd never looked. If Talia said _anything…._

Loving someone didn't give you a right to them. And it was _never _as simple as having or not-having. Some people would say she should walk away _because _of this, but Pam had never been willing to let childish feelings rob her of a good friend. Best friend. Of all the friends she had here, of being _happy,_ for the first time in a long, long time. It hurt, some, still, but she wasn't _pining, _or being anything but realistic. By the time they'd met, Harley was already ridiculously married. It would never come to anything, and so it didn't matter. No need for sympathy or awkwardness. No need for anyone but Pam to do anything. No one needed to know.

"The heart loves as it will," repeated Talia, kindly this time. And laid a finger across her lips.

Pam let her breath out. She most _definitely_ owed Talia al Ghul now. Because she might not be ashamed of how she felt, not the way Talia was, but it was her secret, and a lesser person would have felt utterly justified taking this opportunity for revenge.

Harlequin had picked her way over to the wall where Azrael had pinned Talia earlier, and retrieved something that was presumably her ruined jacket, and now she straightened, brightly, with something that glinted in her hand.

"Harley found your knife," Pam observed, her voice only a little hoarse. "That's important. Fingerprints."

"I need to worry about my fingerprints linking me to the defeat of a murderer?"

Pam shrugged. "This is Owlman's city. You never know when he's going to decide to have evidence twisted against someone." There wasn't really a gentle way to say that, or if there was Pam wasn't good enough with words to think of it, but she tried to soften it with a sympathetic smile, and didn't actually spell out that someone with a complicated romantic-and-adversarial relationship with Bruce Wayne probably didn't want to give Owlman an easy shot at her.

That was really the best way she knew to be kind. Not say the things she knew would hurt.

A fist knocked staccato five times at the barricade Harley'd climbed over, dragging Pam's attention there, and she reached out and tugged at the others, the ones screening them off from the police, telling the vines to take their time, and pushed at the one where she'd felt the knocking, so that it raveled away into little more than wickerwork and she could see the outlines of monks in brown robes. "And the Crusades are on the doorstep," she informed her companion.

Talia snorted, and muttered something in Arabic, which Pam didn't understand but probably agreed with. (Organized religion was a transparent tool of the patriarchy.) "Yes, but they'll take it from here. I, for one, have had enough _fun_ for one night. Home, shower, _bed_."

Her night out had most definitively gotten hijacked and derailed, first by Talia and then by god-damned Azrael, but she didn't mind so much now that it wasn't going to be the last one. Harley was jogging back from the fence now, Talia's dagger in one hand and Pam's abandoned shoes in the other, and Pam's eyes caught on Talia's open wounds. "Uh, and we should probably get those cuts taken care of before we catch the bus." And maybe a change of shirt; the woman was eye-catching enough without the bloodstains.

"It's fine," Talia brushed her off.

Pam folded her arms. "Last I heard, being a total badass was no defense against infections."

Talia pulled a face that Pam thought was probably an emotionally-repressed attempt to react to being scolded and complimented at the same time, and…maybe they could be friends after all.

...Harley was going to be _smug._

* * *

**_A/N:_**_ Ludovic Valley was the Azrael before his son Jean-Paul, the one we saw so much of in the nineties. Azrael is approximately as per canon, apart from color inversion, but the hammy dialogue was all me. The canonical Order of St. Dumas only had an evil faction and an eviler faction. _

_Fight scenes are supposed to be hard to write, yeah? This one went through a good number of revisions, but it was easy as pie compared to the ending. Pam and Talia are both super awkward people, I don't even. __(Also, Ivy/Harley is a canon ship that I sunk by making the clowns' marriage ridiculously stable; Poison Ivy takes Harley Quinn back __**every time **__she splits up with the Joker, even though it never lasts, and Harley is basically her only human relationship.)_


	32. Cincinnatus and the Desk of Doom

'Cincinnatus and the Desk of Doom'

_**A/N: **Reviews and hit rate for last week were gratifyingly high; thank you all very much! Keeps me working away. ('Roofs of Uncertainty' should be coming out of hiatus by the end of the month, and 'Sideshows Triumphant' after that, which may delay Circus updates.)__  
_

_Current chapter set maybe five weeks after 'If Not You,' which was set something like three days after the end of the Injustice War. 'The Owl and the Dead Boy' has yet to occur; reconstruction is progressing apace, and Bruce Wayne is still securely in custody._

* * *

It was a nice day, and Atlantis and America were in communication, strengthening diplomatic relations in the wake of global catastrophe—which was to say, at the moment, that Alex and Orm had each other on the phone, and were taking the time to bitch about being pressured into ruling a country, and calling the bitch session diplomacy.

"—no, that is unfair, I'm not even _Atlantean, _not really. You're American, at least."

Orm had an Alaskan accent, more than an Inupiat one, and Alex made a mental note to check whether he'd given up his US citizenship in taking the throne; it could be important at some point, especially if the Amazons did something unexpected. (Nobody trusted the new queen, but she had the universally acknowledged advantage of not being Superwoman. And so far she hadn't tried to weasel out of paying reparations.) "American, sure," he allowed, sifting through the papers stacked on his Presidential desk, "but I only ever bothered to learn enough upper-class manners to get by in academics and the board room. _State dinners_, Orm, and can you tell me how many senators grew up in slums?"

"I'll guess 'none, for five hundred' but whatever spoon-related difficulty you're facing, _I'm_ hosting state dinners where I don't recognize most of the food."

"Fish?" hazarded Alex.

"_Yes_ fish. Some of it's even cooked." Alex winced in sympathy, an expression wasted on the speakerphone grill. "And while we're on the subject of eating, note that my mother comes from a proud line of whale-hunting captains, which is not something you discuss in polite Atlantean society."

Alex grimaced, scanned another request for allocation of emergency funds, and signed at the bottom. He was with the Atlanteans about eating cetaceans; it smacked of cannibalism. Orm probably even largely agreed, on a purely ethical level, but that couldn't make it easy to turn his back on the heritage he had always owned openly, and mostly with pride. It was hard, being pulled two ways and both sides labelled 'duty.'

"So I'm probably not going home for Nalukataq ever again," Orm added.

"You win, you win," Alex gave. Orm had it worse. And that was _without _factoring in that Alex had prior administrative experience. He bet there was less paperwork underwater, though. "But I still say being king _has_ to be simpler."

"I have more power," Orm admitted, because Atlantis was still an absolute monarchy. Though that only went as far as the willingness of Atlanteans to obey, which was probably not pronounced after what Orin had put them through, and considering Orm's relatively shaky claim to the throne, being as it was through an immortal crazy person. The Congressional resolution of emergency powers that Alex was operating under at the moment probably delegated him almost as much _practical_ authority, even if it had to go through more layers of bureaucracy.

"On the other hand," said the King, "if they decide they want to get rid of me, they pretty much have to kill me. And if they _don't,_ I get to do this for the rest of my life. You're looking at a maximum of eight years."

"They might kill me, too," Alex pointed out, conciliatory. Glared at the report in front of him. The entire intelligence infrastructure of the US was going to have to be torn down and rebuilt, at this rate; finding agents who _weren't_ compromised one way or another was proving well nigh impossible. Worse than the Martian invasion; telepathy was telepathy and impersonators were impersonators, but genuine treachery in a group of professional liars and keepers of secrets...

He was getting Adeline Wilson to head the whole mess if he had to lock himself in a lab for a week and build her son a new voicebox as a bribe. (Or even throw some resources behind Slade's eternal quest to track down the assassin, though that would be less satisfying all around.) Waller was the best he had until then, and while he didn't trust her an inch he _did_ trust that she wasn't loyal to anyone else, either.

"Have you got a bodyguard yet?" Orm asked, the assassination joke apparently less amusing when it wasn't about him.

"No one permanent."

The Secret Service had been just as riddled with moles and assassins as the FBI. The CIA had been a little better at the agent level, but its entire command structure had had to go, and every possible cover was potentially compromised. (The NSA was already halfway through the gutting process; Waller's efficiency was as worrying as it was welcome.) Mostly he'd been relying on volunteers from the League—he was thinking about offering Corben a long-term position. Alex was one of the most qualified roboticists to keep the man's prosthetic body functioning _anyway,_ and he rather liked the idea of mutual reliance, if he was going to have a bodyguard to begin with.

"Bob came to visit," Orm volunteered, possibly still on the same subject.

Alex smiled a little. He couldn't help it; everyone was fond of Bob. "I heard." He put the NSA report aside for now and returned to the Metropolis reconstruction. He was _trying_ not to favor his hometown too much, but they'd done a lot of damage fighting Ultraman, and he wanted to make sure the funds he assigned there were laid out with total efficiency. "He liked Hawaii?"

"Hawaii 'cold and boring.' I think he's thinking about building a house there. Is he a US citizen?" Orm was clearly thinking some of the same things about Bob that Alex had earlier been thinking about _him_, and Alex waved the hand with a pen in it.

"I have a team overhauling the standing laws on non-human sapients in cooperation with a Congressional sub-committee, but even under the current laws…yes, depending on which judge you ask. He was born here, for a given value of 'born.'"

Orm hummed. "I've extended him an open invitation." _In case the mood turns ugly, _he didn't say. Bob might have a 'Made In the USA' sticker metaphorically grafted to his forehead, but he was still a clone of the scariest illegal alien most people had ever heard of. And for all his good nature, he wasn't the easiest person to get to know.

Alex was of the private opinion that even the large practical contributions Brainiac and the Golden Lights had made to the prosecution of the war were outdone by the good press their visible presence had given non-humans, to counterbalance the reactive xenophobia. He would never pretend his country didn't have a history of lashing out at its own in times of fear, especially when its own were visible minorities. "Good." He hesitated only a second before adding, "Consider this my invitation to you, as well. In case of emergency."

"And Atlantis will be open to the League as long as I am king," Orm returned, with all due gravitas. Then he undid the effect with a pinched mutter of, "I still can't believe it when I say things like that."

Alex laughed, scrawling his signature on an approval for the National Guard to work under the direction of civilian engineers who'd been brought on to evaluate surviving-yet-damaged buildings for structural integrity. "You have this, Orm. Just…keep holding the line." He reached for the 'to read carefully before disregarding' stack and picked up yet another petition demanding blood in vengeance for the losses of the war; this time it was a list of villains who'd given themselves up to work off their debt to society using the skills and powers that had made them such effective enactors of tyranny, whom the petitioners wanted executed.

Oddly enough, Swamp Thing was listed. Nobody knew where Swamp Thing even _was_ these days; he was most assuredly not in the employ of the US Government.

He sighed. "Why did we not ask Adam and Zazzala for governing advice _before_ it was a potential source of major international embarrassment?"

Orm was silent for a second; Alex thought maybe he'd asked one of them for advice anyway and was now, in his capacity as a private individual, embarrassed. "Bito says the main thing is to keep the voice of the people in mind," he offered.

Alex set the petition aside with his now-habitual look of wry commiseration toward George Washington's grim portrait, and turned to a proposed law that had made it through Congress with remarkable efficiency, regarding the use of government funds to subsidize private reconstruction of the damaged highway system (in order to restore the essential infrastructure in a more timely manner than existing local road crews could achieve), and the proposed system of regulation and oversight (that would hopefully keep this plan from killing a lot of people with poorly-built roads and bridges while the independent contractors pocketed the difference), and pulled a beleaguered face that was once again wasted on his empty office, but (hopefully) came through in his voice.

"_Bito's_ country has a population of _four hundred and two._"

* * *

_**A/N: **__Okay, so at this rate I'm going to have a whole subset of 'phone call chapters,' or maybe of 'Alex Luthor vs. Paperwork.' Sue me. _

_Nineties Superboy had a pleasant early run as the signature superhero of Hawaii. (Obviously Bizarro is not Superboy, but there's overlap.) Villain shoutouts: John Corben is Metallo. Black Adam and Queen 'Bee' rule Khandaq and Bialya respectively, both fictional places in Africa, and Bito Wladon is Sonar, ruler of Modora, which is teeny-tiny and in the Balkans. And, uh, also fictional._

_On a real-world note, persons of native nations born within the US were granted formal citizenship in 1924, and again more inclusively in 1940. Nalukataq is essentially the official whale-eating holiday; whale hunting is an important part of coastal Inupiak culture, and as such they are exempted from the relevant conservation laws. So long as they don't turn it commercial. _


	33. Dent I: Heads

Dent I: 'Heads'

* * *

A silver disc spins high under tasteful low lighting, and a tan, well-manicured hand snatches it out of the air and slaps it onto the back of the opposite wrist. Bright white teeth glitter in a handsome face, and the District Attorney for Gotham City lounges back in his plush booth.

"Heads you pick up the tab, tails I do."

"That wasn't funny the first time," says the billionaire on the other side of the table, very dryly. Harvey's wise to him, though. He's considered notable for his humorlessness, but it's really just a matter of learning to recognize his jokes. They're usually at your expense, and never involve smiling. Harvey laughs, and spins the lucky piece over his knuckles, not bothering to pretend to check, when they both know it can only have come up heads.

"You know I never bet except on a sure thing, Bruce."

"Yes, well, neither do I," says his patron with a significant quirk of an eyebrow, and Harvey accepts the subtle compliment without demur. He likes to think he's proven a good gamble.

They get back into Bruce's car, after the bill of course never comes up, because the restaurant knows to put it on Bruce's account and not bother him personally with things like paying for lunch. This was a working lunch, but it was also an indulgence, and Harvey needs to get back to the office in time to finish the afternoon's work. A housing regulation Bruce put through City Hall a few months ago is under judicial review, and they discuss what sort of pressure the judge in question is likely to respond to most of the way across midtown.

As they draw up in front of the gargoyle-pocked Courthouse, though, Bruce leans forward just before the limousine door opens. "Harvey."

Harvey gives him his full attention.

"The Jackson case. You might want to…let it go."

"Let it go?" Harvey shakes his head in incredulity. "Bruce, I have this man dead to rights for weapons smuggling, and you want me to let it go?"

He knows what this is, of course; he worked out years ago that Bruce has some kind of deal with the Owl. Mutual support, or something. He's not completely sure what Bruce is getting out of it that's worth his time, but he doesn't _act_ like a man being blackmailed, so there's that. Richard 'Brick' Jackson works for the Owlman, and if he offers information in a plea bargain, Harvey will finally have something to go after the city's most abruptly powerful crimelord. If not an identity, some solid testimony about his existence and criminal activity from someone who's actually _met _the man.

Not, he admits to himself, that that's likely; Witness Protection is a sieve, everyone knows it, and the Owl's men are ready to die for him or they never get past entry-level positions. Jackson will go to prison without giving up a word, but apparently he's useful enough that the Owl has asked Bruce to lean on Harvey.

Bruce shrugs. "Pursuing it might end badly," he says, with the smooth bland tone Harvey envied from the time they first met, the way it hints at layered meanings under the obvious words.

Or, Harvey allows, it might not be about Jackson himself. It might simply be the Owl showing the world the kind of protection he can offer his loyal followers; able to call off the hounds of the law with a word, in the face of the most compelling evidence.

People already say enough about corruption in Gotham; Harvey's not ruining his own credibility for all time by jumping at a kingpin's word, even word passed via a major campaign contributor.

"Just a piece of advice," says Bruce. "From a friend." He smiles, and Harvey smiles back.

"Thanks for thinking of me, Bruce," he says.

"I try." Bruce shakes his hand, and they exchange the usual farewells, before Harvey actually gets out of the car.

"Oh, and Harvey…" Bruce's voice stops him on the sidewalk, and he turns back, squinting a little to see into the dimness of a cave of tinted glass, from where he stands in full sun. "Congratulations on your anniversary."

Harvey produces his best grin. "Thanks. Don't call for me at the office tonight; I'm taking Gilda out. Come Hell or Major Crimes Unit."

Bruce smirks and nods him a farewell before the chauffeur swing the door shut, leaving the District Attorney to step around a panhandler, mount the steps into the courthouse, and take the elevator up to his office, where he lets his smile vanish, and frowns out the window at the limousine just pulling away through the heavy midafternoon traffic.

Harvey owes the man a lot; mostly in the form of campaign funds but also in favors and strings pulled. He'd probably never have entered politics at all without Bruce's help and influence. If it was a _personal _favor, that would be one thing; if one of Bruce's executives had crossed a major line and he wanted to deal with it privately to protect Wayne Industries' reputation, Harvey would be _entirely_ understanding, and let the matter slide.

But Bruce Wayne doesn't own him. Harvey can't afford to have him as an enemy, not if he wants to keep his career moving, but even _Bruce Wayne_ won't throw over someone he's invested this much in, for breaking ranks over something this small. He'll probably respect Harvey more for it, actually. He has enough bootlickers around; someone who actually _thinks_ can only be a relief. Heaven knows _he_ would appreciate having more than one assistant DA with a brain in their head.

Besides, whatever his links to the Owl are, Bruce can't really _want_ a weapons smuggler to go free. He's been a supporter of stricter gun control since…well, probably since he was eight. Everyone knows what happened to the Waynes. How could a man who doesn't believe people can be trusted with firearms possibly _want_ Brick Jackson to be let off?

Harvey returns to his desk and absently considers the perpetual paperwork. He's not going after the Owl with everything he has. The game has to be played, and as long as the bulk of organized crime in Gotham is passing through the man's claws and he has the bulwark of Bruce Wayne to hide behind, he's pretty much untouchable—and trying to touch him directly will put Harvey on Bruce's bad side. He gets that. No gangbusting for him. Someday there'll be a breakdown of relations between Bruce and his pet criminal mastermind, and when that day comes Harvey will be sitting on a heap of evidence, but he can wait.

In the meantime, though…big weapons smuggling conviction will look good for the public, even if it doesn't do anything to stem the actual arms traffic, since Jackson's barely more than a pawn. That just means the Owl can afford to lose him. Let him consider it a message to his other subordinates not to get caught.

Harvey reviews major upcoming cases and grinds his way through paperwork for the next four hours, and then instead of continuing for a few hours more, as is usual, he packs certain documents into his briefcase and leaves the building with a nod to his secretary. The reservation isn't until six, but it won't do to risk being late.

Gilda meets him at the door in her slip, paints and brushes all cleaned up and put away in the studio along with her smock. Her hair is set into the kind of artful heaps of golden curls he's never been able to determine whether she somehow manages to do herself, or alternately manages to obtain from a salon without his ever detecting her going out to do so. He holds the massive bouquet he had ordered weeks ago out of the way as she stretches up to kiss him, and knows his smile is less than dignified when she breaks away.

"You're on time," she teases, running her hand down the side of his neck. "Are there any reports of flying pigs?"

"Not that I heard, but I was in a hurry and I've told the office not to call me for anything, so I might have missed it," he answers, which must pass muster because she rewards him with another kiss.

"Now honey," he says, when this one ends, "I know our neighbors have better things to do than spy, but Gotham's DA really can't be seen being ravished on the doorstep by a lady in her negligée."

Gilda blushes and lets him the rest of the way in. "For you," he announces grandly once the door is closed, presenting the bouquet, "my golden rose."

His suit is laid out on the bed when he goes upstairs, after Gilda goes to find a sufficiently large vase for the abundance of roses. He showers, quickly, and shaves off the hint of stubble that's grown since the morning before he changes into it, a cut above the sort of pinstriped thing he wears to the office, and stops to dig a little blue-velvet box out of his bedside drawer and tuck it into the jacket pocket before Gilda comes up. He struggles as always with his cumberbund but doesn't ask for help because if he were concentrating as intently on anything as she seems to be on her mascara, leaning close to the mirror at the back of her vanity table, he wouldn't welcome the interruption.

She does tie his tie for him, which isn't necessary but is sort of a ritual, like his zipping her into her dress—tie and dress complimentary but not identical shades of blue (too matchy is _gauche, _apparently, in addition to being artistically void) and it's then that he reaches into his pocket and presents the little box. He might have saved it for the restaurant, but he doesn't _need _to show off for an audience, and since she picked the blue dress for this evening…

Already smiling before she lifts the lid, Gilda lights up at the two perfect teardrop-cut gems lying on their little cushion.

Harvey grins, too. "Happy Anniversary, Gilda."

"Oh, Harvey! They're lovely. And sapphires are so much more _tasteful_ than diamonds at this size."

Diamonds this size would also have been an expense well outside his budget, as she very well knows; he's no Bruce Wayne, but he thinks that's a sincere opinion, not a dig. Besides, Gilda loves sapphires.

She smiles as she takes one out and turns it in the light. "And this would be why I got a blue silk dress for my birthday, wouldn't it?"

He shrugs. "I like you in blue. Matches your eyes." She raises her eyebrows, and he adds, "and brings out your hair and skin and all those lovely things."

Gilda rolls her eyes and laughs. "You did good, Dent," she says, and kisses him again.

She lets him hang her anniversary present in her ears before they leave the house, and they sail into _Le Fleur _with her on his arm and opera tickets in his pocket for later. The food is perfect, the wine is excellent. They are young and beautiful and successful, and tonight is theirs to be happy.

Harvey Dent is on top of the world.

* * *

The next day, of course, he's back at the office, half an hour later than usual but still not technically late. He meets with Jackson and his suspiciously-expensive defense attorney one last time in hopes of striking a bargain for full disclosure on the smuggler's associates; is refused. The private attorney, one Ms. Madrigal, who began the meeting smirking only a little more subtly than Jackson, looks pinched and forbidding by the end. "Mr. Dent," she says, frosty, as Harvey packs up his briefcase. "I advise you to be _very certain _this is the course you want to take."

Harvey snaps both clasps shut. "I believe that's my line," he says. Stands. "Good day."

"You won't get away with this, you son of a bitch," Jackson growls, fulminating in his handcuffs.

"Good day," Harvey repeats. "I'll see you in court."

Within the week, they do. Theoretically, considering the strength of the evidence, they could wrap this up in a few hours. But the defense attorney is determined to drag it out like a woman trying to wring blood from a stone, and Harvey is more than content to let it spin out a little into a show trial, since one of the reasons he's doing this is to show himself being tough on crime. There is, as always, a pretty serious gun homicide rate in Gotham this year. The kind of pieces Jackson brought in are part of why. It makes a good story; he's got several reporters lined up near the front of the viewing gallery, including that Vale woman who asked him much less confrontational questions in this press conference than usual.

So they sprawl on into the second day, and then the pace seems to have changed, Madrigal's arguments briefer and less vociferous, increasingly as though she's only going through the motions, until she calls Richard Jackson in his own defense, and the stocky, muscled mobster lies fairly transparently on the stand. Harvey goes forward to cross-examine him, rearranging his plan of attack in his mind to deal with the man's sudden decision to claim to be a construction worker, among other things. "You are Richard Jackson, also known as 'Brick?'" he asks, since for some reason Madrigal hadn't.

"That's right," says the defendant. "My ma called me Ricky."

Harvey raises his eyebrows at that but doesn't allow himself to comment. "And," he begins, stepping toward the witness stand with one hand upraised for dramatic purposes.

He sees something in the man's eyes, then, something fiercer than the surly hate he'd gotten used to, and he's been doing this long enough to transform his brief unease into action when the defendant's arm flies up. He spins away, ducking, more of a flinch than a real dodge. It would have saved him from a knife and bought precious seconds against a gun, but the thrown liquid splashes across a wide arc. Much of it misses him, to sizzle faintly on the floor.

More than enough finds its target.

It is hard to say whether he falls to his knees, clutches his face, or screams in agony first, though it is generally agreed that the scream in fact comes last, and it is what jolts the crowd into panic.

"Message from the Owl," Jackson hisses, almost inaudible under Harvey's voice and the others rising to join it. The cops that were standing by for security pile onto him, dragging him away as the courtroom erupts into hysteria. Two officers spare themselves from the perpetrator to drag the DA's hand away from his face; one promptly lets go to vomit at the base of the witness stand, when he catches sight of glistening flesh still being eaten away.

Reporter Vicki Vale vaults over the railing at the front of the stands, to throw the contents of both her iced coffee and her water bottle over the man's face in quick succession, then turns to shout into the yammering (and in some cases fleeing, presumably in case of more acid) audience for people to toss down any water they have.

Compliance is mixed and results in both airborne liquid without any container and some fairly threatening projectiles in the form of Nalgene and other tough reusable bottles, but the woman gathers up enough in the way of full containers to rush back to Harvey's side and continue rinsing the skin of his face (and, belatedly, the hand that received a contact transfer) clean of the acid, with a particular focus on the area around his right eye.

By this time his screams have dwindled to a sort of half-conscious whimpering.

When the EMTs arrive a few minutes later to find her still at it, one of them tells her she may have saved Mr. Dent's life. She hopes that _may _means he could have survived without her, and not that his survival is still in question. She might not like the slick, dishonest DA, but that doesn't mean she ever seriously wanted him to die a horrible death. Especially not for doing something _right_.

It's a relief when they drug him unconscious before rolling him away.

* * *

They keep him sedated for some time—through the emergency treatment and then the first, most essential surgeries, saving everything that can be saved to keep the damaged tissues serving as a _face,_ which are definitely not something anyone wants to attempt on anyone conscious. After he wakes up, he's on a boatload of pain medications and none too coherent.

"Hey, honey," Gilda says, tucking the bouquet she brought under her chin so it's in his line of sight. "How are you feeling?"

He tries to smile at her, but his whole face is shot so full of muscle relaxants, to prevent him from destroying the surgeons' work, that it doesn't respond, and his breath picks up sharply.

When he realizes he's strapped to the bed, it takes so long to calm him down that the nurses just pump in enough morphine to knock him out again.

They manage, with the aid of quite a lot of drugs, to keep him quiet for a week before he starts demanding, with increasing stridency, to know the details of his condition. It's a few days after that before his doctor promises to let him see things for himself, and in the end it's been two weeks since the attack by the time he's allowed to sit up on the edge of his bed with all the bandages unwrapped and the muscle relaxants having been allowed to wear off.

The room is crowded with an orderly and a nurse along with the doctor, and all the flowers and cards and balloons he's received from his friends and supporters and employees and everyone who considers it politically expedient to make sure they send the injured DA some kind of get-well token. All the chocolates and fruit baskets not hand-delivered by people he trusts were summarily thrown out. He's recovering from an incredibly blatant assassination attempt, _honestly._ Most of the ones that were kept have been eaten by Gilda, while she sorted through the cards and things and made a list of the names, for future reference. She likes sweets more than he does, and she eats when she's tense, and she's spent a lot more time in this room _awake_ than he has.

Vicki Vale sent half a pound of shade-grown fair-trade coffee beans. He sent her a thank-you note that had very little to do with the coffee. Well. That coffee.

People keep trying to call what happened 'his accident.' He's let all of them know in no uncertain terms that that is unacceptable. This was no accident; this was a carefully-planned chain of events. And there will be a reckoning for that.

"Now, remember," Dr. Astego cautions, calling him back to the stomach-lurching present. Gilda isn't here because he can't deal with her reaction at the same time as his. She's _never _been in the room while the nurses changed the dressings. He needed to know before she did. "You still have healing to do."

"Okay," Harvey says impatiently.

"And…please realize that you're very lucky to have very little loss of function. We now know you've suffered no impairment to your vision, and none of your major muscle groups are paralyzed."

"Give me a mirror," Harvey growls. He might be hospitalized, and traumatized, and very much not at his best, but he's had enough time to get his feet under him again. It is his right to know his own condition. If they attempt to stall any longer, he will not be held accountable for his actions.

Reluctantly, the doctor motions to the nurse, who lifts a small plastic hand mirror. Harvey leans forward and snatches it. He's had enough loss of agency recently, thank you.

He stares into his own face. Reaches up, slowly, with the unbandaged hand, to run his fingers over the damage, and flinches from the pain of it. "Mr. Dent, please don't touch—" begins the doctor, before the mirror clatters to the floor.

And then there's screaming again, not the agony from before, not even panic, quite. Rage. Horror. Loss.

_Rage._

Harvey fights off the doctor, the nurse, and two orderlies who rush in to stop him from tearing at the darkened, puckered, shiny scar tissue that has taken the place of half of his handsome face. As though he thinks his old self is hiding underneath, waiting to be dug up, though he doesn't, there's not enough coherency in him to think any such thing. He bloodies two noses, blackens three eyes, dislocates four fingers, and cracks a cheekbone before they get a needle of sedative into him.

* * *

Later, days later, when he's finally being released to outpatient care (including counseling and psychological evaluations), he finally faces a mirror again. His eye really is fine, he closed it in time, but the flesh around it has drawn back like it does on a half-rotted corpse, fixing it wide, white showing all around the iris, as though he is constantly panicked, or something worse. He tries a squint, hoping for a look of studied concentration, and only achieves homicidal rage.

At least it still closes. So does his mouth, though he has to stretch the right side of his lips out of their new resting snarl for it. The doctor was right. It could be worse. He could be faced with food dribbling out of his mouth with every bite and needing constant application of eyedrops to see, and a piratical patch to go to sleep. He could be half-blind, and hopelessly slurring his speech. He has lost almost no function.

He's hideous.

Completely, unspeakably hideous, with the slick, red-and-white marbled texture of his regrowing skin and scars, with the eye and the lips and…more than anything it looks like half his face is a week or so dead. Like Hel, he thinks suddenly, the Norse ruler of the dead—half her body was a corpse, though there's always been some disagreement about whether she was divided left from right or bottom from top.

Well, there's another thing to be grateful for, then: he isn't paraplegic. He could have been shot in the back and be in a wheelchair; instead of half his face looking dead, half his body actually _could _be.

A lot of strides have been made with equal rights and accommodations for the handicapped, but that very-real helplessness would still have been worse than this. It _would._

Harvey _knows_ it would.

The saying is that _the mind is a plaything of the body_. It is catchy and less than accurate; the body would have to have intention and desire and, in essence, a mind of its own, to toy with anything. But this certainly is true: mind and body are not two. Harvey has always been drawn to Cartesian dualism, to the self as something existing outside the material shell, but if the break were so clean, brain injuries and psychotropic drugs couldn't cause such profound changes in personality. Harvey took a Neuroethics elective seminar in undergrad, to his continuing irritation ever since when dealing with mentally ill criminals and the question of their responsibility for their actions. The definition of a person is tied inextricably to their flesh.

And this undeniably is what he is now: horrifically disfigured. It will be the first thing people notice about him, forever. He will have to learn to live with ugliness, with unconscious revulsion in people's eyes.

Gilda still smiles at him, but ever since the bandages came off, sometimes he thinks—well. It's not like he can blame her, if she's taking a while to adjust. He's not the man she married anymore.

His friends are keeping a certain distance, even now that he can have visitors, but it'll all settle out once he's back in the game. Karen Undermoue, the only Assistant DA with a brain in her head, has been by six times with updates and requests for advice as she fills in for him. Her eyes tend to jump uneasily between the good and bad sides of his face, but she's joked gamely that when he gets back to looming around the courtroom, his famous cross-examinations are going to be that much more devastating now.

He takes comfort from that point: he can _use_ this. It's mostly loss, and it isn't as though he was an unimposing figure before, but still. That's something. He has menace. He survived another assassination attempt, this one far from unscathed, but he's on his feet again. Justice will not be kept down. He'd rather be appealing, but at least now he's unforgettable. If he _can_ still win elections like this, he will probably become an institution in his own right before long.

He should probably give up hopes of moving higher than DA for Gotham, though. There were hopes of being Attorney General for the state within five to ten years. Now…no. Never, probably.

It's alright. He will be alright. He will, because he must.

* * *

Less than a week later sees him mixing pain pills and whiskey. He knows it's stupid. Knows, and doesn't care.

Jackson was already easy enough to nail to the wall on the gunrunning charges, but he assaulted Harvey in _open court_, in full view of an assistant DA, a city judge, a dozen police officers, and considerable representation by the public, including the redoubtable newspaper reporter who possibly saved Harvey's life. There was no question that Karen would be able to put him away for decades.

Except he disappeared from custody between two and three o'clock this morning.

Harvey flips his double-headed silver half-dollar into the air, fumbles the catch, and closes his eyes against the world as his fists clench and the coin jingles across the smooth hardwood of the desk in his study.

The Owl never even _needed_ Harvey to get his man free. Yes, it would have been more useful to have him let off and not on the run from the law, but it had really been just for the sake of a power display. 'I can get my people off any charge, just because they're _mine_.' And when Harvey hadn't fallen into line, he'd used him to show off anyway. One of the Owl's minions burned off half a District Attorney's face, and is going without punishment. That's making a statement.

He expects the police aren't making anywhere near the appropriate effort. Not when there is profit in letting the Owl go his own way and a burned-off face in hindering him. No one's talking to him much anymore; even Karen's been getting less and less communicative since his psych report as 'presently unfit to return to public service' came through. Just because he lost his temper with the counselor! And now _this_.

And Bruce…Bruce knew. He went along with it. He must have. And now he isn't answering his phone.

"Dammit!" Harvey snarls, and a second later his glass smashes against the far wall. It's followed by a frosted-glass paperweight and the small brass plaque he was awarded as valedictorian. Its corner leaves a dent in the paneling. "_Damn him! _That miserable, two-faced son of a—" _Two-faced _his mind interrupts him, sarcastic at his own expense, and he bites down hard on the inside of his cheek and throws the pill bottle as well.

Since he doesn't want to break any more of his things, or pull Gilda out of her studio with another round of screaming, he contents himself with more profanity, in Latin this time. He studied it for practical reasons in the legal profession and for the cachet, but he doesn't know _any_ language with better curses—he is given to understand that Russian is even better to swear in, once you get the knack, but he doesn't know enough of the language to pull any of the really satisfying grammatical pile-ups of obscenity and rage.

Latin cursing is very anatomically precise, and somewhere in his detailed itemization of who in Bruce Wayne's genealogy was fucked in what orifice by what animal, he starts to calm down a little, both with the catharsis and the organized nature of the activity, and the soothing routine of making sure he conjugates the genitive case correctly.

The phone rings. Harvey stares at it, until it rings again, and then, jerkily, he answers.

"Hello."

"Harvey." Cool, not unfriendly. Just as if this was any other day. "I heard you were trying to get in touch with me."

Bruce. His hand shakes on the receiver. "You knew."

"You left messages."

Today is not a day on which he can appreciate Bruce's sense of humor. Probably no day ever will again. Harvey's jaw has clenched too tightly to pry apart. "You knew what the Owl was planning."

"I'm sure I don't know what you mean." That perfect bland voice, the one Harvey was always imitating, all subtle inflections and nothing you could pin anything on.

"It was a _test_, wasn't it? To see how obedient I was. You bastard-born toerag, I thought you'd _appreciate_ not being _totally_ surrounded by sycophants and criminals, and you…you do _this…_" His scarred right hand is plastered over his face again, the way it keeps doing even though he's not supposed to touch it except to apply the ointments and moisturizers.

"Mister Dent," the billionaire bites out coldly through the telephone. "You may wish to restrain your wild speculation before you find yourself being sued for slander."

Harvey sucks breath through his teeth and could not speak if he tried, because he's been on the other end of this, smacking people down with the weight of knowing they can't afford a lawsuit, can't afford to defy him or his clients. Crushing them. It felt so right when he was the one doing it.

"But Harvey…" Bruce's voice says through the line, deep and bland and almost, witheringly, kind. "I did warn you."

_Click._

* * *

**_A/N:_**_ Two points in the how-many-desks-will-Trisak-put-in-this-story game! And 'throw iced coffee on it' appears very, very low on the list of 'things to do to chemical burns,' especially when you don't know what substance is doing the burning, but it does come in just above 'nothing,' when no one else is doing anything either. _

_Obviously there is a part two. Because Harvey Dent. ^^ Thank you for reading, and please do review!  
_


	34. Dent II: Tails

Dent II: 'Tails'

**_A/N: _**_This chapter is later than I'd hoped but is also insanely long, which I hope buys full forgiveness. Happy President's Day to my fellow Americans, and please do let me know what you think._

* * *

Harvey wakes up late the next day, so late he's almost run out of morning. His old sleep schedule's been out of reach since his injury, especially after early recovery had him sleeping fourteen hours a day and then the pain-induced insomnia later on cut him down to between four and six, but he hasn't done this very often. Sleep leaves him slowly, stickily, and he sits up in bed blinking (his distorted right eye not quite in sync with the other, because the lid has further to go, so that the world seems to scuttle momentarily to the right with every blink) and head aching from last night's substance abuse.

It takes a minute to realize something's wrong, and a little longer to figure out what: Gilda's vanity table. The jars and brushes and scattering of bright jewelry that usually clutter the surface and redouble to a trove in the mirror are gone. It's empty.

He gets up, frowns at his own creased pajamas but doesn't bother to dress. He's sure there's a good reason for this.

Gilda's studio is the obvious place to look—she spends most of her time there, after all, when she's in the house. Not only is she missing, when he looks in, so are all her paints, and a good percentage of the finished canvases.

When he finally catches up to her in the front hall, straightening her hair in the mirror with a suitcase by her feet, it's only a confirmation of what he'd already figured out.

"Are you going to be gone long?" he inquires.

She jumps, pulling her hands out of her hair almost guiltily, and thins her lips at him, and then her expression softens a little, and she looks away. "You could say that," she answers quietly. Licks her lips in a quick little dart of tongue, like the way she uses a bevel-headed brush when she's laying down a large-scale image. "Harvey, I'm leaving."

"What…" he asks stupidly. Going away for a while, to stay with her mother or something until he stops being a self-abusing moron, fine. He understood. It wouldn't be the first time they needed a break. But the way she just said that…. "What do you mean, leaving?"

"I mean I'm _leaving_, Harvey. I'm not coming back."

Everything stops. His heart most of all. The pain that is the right side of his face flares and retreats, and he stares at her. "Gilda," he says.

"It's not because of your—injuries," she says. Lies. Her face is like stone, and she's staring over his shoulder again, avoiding his face. "You aren't stable, Harvey. I'm afraid to be alone with you, and I doubt you're getting your position back. I'll have the paperwork sent to you by Friday."

She isn't just leaving him. She's _divorcing_ him, as quickly as possible, because the pre-nuptial agreement gives her half of his total assets, and she has judged that he is sufficiently ruined that the total amount to which she has a claim is only going to decrease from this point forward.

Gilda was his only certainty. Was he never anything more to her than a…source of income? He wants to tell her that he loves her, wants to beg her to reconsider, wants to ask if she was lying to him all along. "Gilda, why…"

"I can't deal with this," she says. Not looking in his direction anymore. She picks up her final suitcase.

Fury clutches at his heart, and the scar that is his face seems to tighten against his skull. "_You,_" he snarls, taking a step forward. And now she's looking at him again, backing up toward the door with her eyes wide in her face, and he realizes his hands have closed into fists and he has _never_ come this close to threatening her before. The young skin on his right hand sears with the pressure.

He digs his nails in, rocks on his feet to restrain the urge to advance on her, to frighten her again. "You promised," he says. "We promised to always be there for each other. I need you now, Gilda. More than ever. How can you…"

"Oh! You need me! And when I needed you?" There are tears swimming in her eyes.

"I've always given you everything I—"

"Oh, _things!_" Gilda snaps. "You've given me those. You've done your duty. You've _provided_ for me."

"If that wasn't what you wanted—" He's not sure how he's going to finish that sentence. You should have said something? You shouldn't have married me?

"Where were you when I lost the baby?" Gilda spits. "Where were you when my sister died? When I had to put the cat down, even? Working!"

"I was there!" Harvey protests, because he _was_. He bought her cake and offered her any choice of kitten after Birchbark died, came home early when the news came about Mirianne, held her and promised as many times as she asked that he didn't think it was her fault she'd miscarried, not even a little, of course not. He loved her.

"For a few hours!" Gilda shoots back. "A day! Until I was over the worst of it! And then you had to get back to your real life, and I was alone in the house with my paints and whatever present you grubbed up to buy me off with. Well, I stayed through the worst of it. Don't tell me you _need _me to _support_ you for the rest of your messed-up life! I'm not the one who turned this marriage into an exchange of goods!"

She spins on a long heel, then, strides back toward the door in a self-righteous swing of skirt and case. Harvey wants to scream. He wants to rush after her and throw her against the wall and tell her she has to get past him if she thinks she's going anywhere. He wants to fall to his knees and beg her forgiveness.

"Gilda—!" he manages to choke out, while she's framed by the doorway, backlit against the street, chiaroscuro in the early evening light. She doesn't look around, but she does hesitate, and he thinks, wildly, that this is his chance, his last chance. She cares enough to stop and listen. If only he knew the magic words. "I do need you," he tells her, helplessly. "Gilda, I love you so much."

If that isn't enough to stay for…but it isn't, and she's already moving again, not answering, and then the door swings closed—not a slam, not a gesture of rage, just a devastating—_click._

* * *

There's a long period after that where Harvey loses track of himself. On one level, he's completely aware of what he's doing, but it's a thin, brittle layer of awareness that seems to have no line of connection to long-term memory, as though whatever madness seizes him is like a drug or blow to the head that knocks the hypothalamus' information-transfer powers offline in the rush of other duties, and all he knows is the need to break, and break, and _break…._

He steadies out again in the ruin of what was their bedroom. He's completely destroyed the mattress and most of the furniture. There are wood splinters embedded in his right hand, and he's only just beginning to feel them. There are shards of broken mirror beside the remnants of Gilda's empty vanity, but he must have retained just enough sense not to do the breaking with his bare hands, because they aren't glass-tattered.

This…feels better. Gilda left it clean and neat, almost as if nothing had changed. It should _show_ when things are ruined beyond recall. When something is broken, everyone should be able to see.

This is not going to help his case for mental competency. Gilda didn't think he had a chance anyway.

Bruce Wayne is against him. He doesn't have a chance. He never did.

He shakes himself. No. No, he can't think like that. He feels scraped and raw and empty even of anger, even when he experimentally clenches his fist.

Ow. The hand was still sensitive from acid burns and now it's full of splinters. He sways to his feet. Tweezers and antiseptic behind the mirror in the bathroom. He can face the mirror for long enough to get it open. Now that Gilda's gone, he can cover or get rid of all the mirrors. Why not?

White down from a ruptured pillow drifts aside from the wind of his passage, and the deep blue glint of one sapphire teardrop stares up from the carpet.

One. Just one.

Before he knows it he is tearing the room apart again, first aid forgotten, searching every narrowest cranny for the other earring. There were two. _There should be two. _He scrabbles through the mess from the vanity drawers, but there is next to nothing valuable left. Emery boards and bobby pins and twenty-seven shades of nail polish—no gems. He cannot determine how he turned the bed over the first time, and so settles for taking it apart, and heaving the torn mattress aside once the bedstead is in pieces in a corner. He searches literally everywhere, and falls to his knees at last in an exhausted stupor beside the patient, baleful glare of the lone jewel.

It isn't there. The mate. Either it is lost, or Gilda took it with her. Took one, and left the other. On purpose? One half of a pair. His last present to her, split. It seems almost as though there is a message in that he is meant to discern, but he can't. There is only—_one_ is incomplete. There should be two. There should always be two.

The lonely gem is very light in his palm, the thin silver line of the fitting cold, and he thinks wildly, suddenly, that he doesn't remember what happened to his lucky coin after he dropped it last night. As if it _mattered,_ as if even his most whimsical side could ever believe in a lucky piece that was in his breast pocket when his face was burned off.

It's in his pajama pocket, though; he picked it up either when he was still drunk or while he was whited out, and he's pulled it out with his empty right hand, the metal already warm from lying close to his skin

He turns the silver coin over in his discolored palm, the sting of the splinters in his knuckles almost reassuring as he stares at the thing, a tiny moon in a sky stained red and yellow with bloody sunset. Its perfect, identical silver faces. He loathes it, suddenly. The lies his father told him—that you can control your fate, that staying loyal to law and order will guarantee its protection in return. He chokes on them. Every betrayed shred of trust, and he hears his own voice snarling in the shocked silence of the ruined room.

Then his left hand has come around, digging, _gouging_ at the head-side that happens to be turned up, trying to carve away that bland, calm face and its smooth right cheek. The post is silver, too, but it's also forged hard and stiff into its present shape, and the coin is old enough that it was cast for its bullion value and is practically pure. By the time the tiny bright hook is mangled past usefulness, the coin is marred with scratches that gleam bright from the hidden heart of the metal, and Harvey's throat aches with the growl that forces its way up it, and he turns the earring in his grip and keeps carving, with the sharpest edge of the teardrop, widening the scratches into gouges, until he's torn apart the face of the man who someone thought was worth marking on a coin, and someone else was careless enough to strike onto it _twice_.

He isn't crying. He's _not._

He falls asleep there, on the littered floor, ruined earring clutched tight in one hand, defaced coin in the other; only knows he did when he wakes up to the cold light of dawn reaching its fingers through the windows from which he cannot remember tearing the drapes.

Hot anger drained out of him as he slept, poured into the face of the silver half-dollar, and he wakes up cold, in his limbs and in his heart. Stands, brushing down and splintered wood from his pajamas, and walks very deliberately into the bathroom, where he yanks the bathroom mirror off its hinges, props it up next to the toilet with its face turned into the tile, and sits down on the edge of the tub to carefully prise the splinters out of his hand with a pair of tweezers.

When he's finished that, he showers, then spreads antibiotic ointment over the punctures, bandages them, and goes to figure out if he still has any presentable clothes in the overturned wardrobe, to go out in.

He has some shopping to do.

That evening, an hour or so past sunset, finds him in a poorly-lit hallway with a filthy carpet, wearing a shabby greatcoat, with a fedora pulled low over his face. The apartments in this building are disgusting rattraps, and tiny besides, but the landlord rents them cheap, by the week, without bothering with signed leases or any of that official trouble. Harvey walks with calm purpose along the foul brown carpeting until he finds the door marked _319._ He knocks.

"Yeah?" comes a suspicious voice from inside.

"Got news," Harvey grinds out, affecting a rough East End accent, with a hint of Chicago to cover any oddities a native might pick up.

He's moderately surprised when after a second, the bolt clicks open. "Better be good," the occupant of the apartment grumbles, pulling the door slightly ajar and peering around it grimly. "What's the pass…" He stops, as the visitor raises his chin enough to view his quarry's face, and opens his own to view in turn.

"_Dent?_" says Jackson, staring up at him across the eight inch difference in their heights, and Harvey…Harvey _smiles_. With both sides of his face.

"Hello there, Ricky."

The man shifts. Harvey knows he has a sidearm on him, probably in the hand behind the door frame—paranoia is a life skill for people like him—but it doesn't matter. He pulls his own trigger, and the shotgun blast tears right through the door and into Jackson's leg.

Choking, the man goes down, but he's still bringing the pistol up toward Harvey's head, so he shoves hard at the door and ducks. The bullet winds up in the ceiling. Harvey shoves again, sending Jackson onto his back, forces his way into the room—paranoia is a life skill but _effective_ paranoia takes intelligence; Brick should have known better than to take a room with a door that opened inward.

He stomps on Jackson's forearm before the crook can gather what wits he has, grinds his heel in until the tendons give up and Brick loses his grip on his stubby semiautomatic. Lowers the shotgun to point into the other man's eyes. He got the kind that fires twice before you need to reload it; he's curious whether Jackson will think the just-discharged weapon is a bluff and do something stupid. An arms dealer should know better, but Jackson was only really ever a functionary in someone else's trade, and his stock never ran to anything as common as shotguns.

"What the _fuck,_" Jackson groans, and then his eyes focus on the doubled barrel and he doesn't seem to think it's a bluff at all.

"Justice seems to be in short supply in Gotham," Harvey states mildly.

"A _crippled fucking lawyer?_" Jackson asks, apparently of the universe, and Harvey shifts all his weight to the foot on the man's arm so he can kick him in the side with the other.

"You didn't cripple me," Harvey bites out. Kicks again for good measure, aiming for the floating ribs. Brick takes it less well than you'd expect someone with his record to do, but he _does_ have a thigh full of lead shot. Probably absorbing most of his pain tolerance. "A courtesy I may not return."

Brick shakes off his astonishment at the situation along with his pain, and looks up along the shotgun at Harvey, focusing on the 'good' side of his face—everyone does that, he's noticed, chooses a side and interacts with that, as if the two faces cannot _possibly_ be one person—"Look," he says, "Dent, you get that it was nothing personal, right? It was fucked up, I'm really sorry you got…" he flounders. "Fucked up," he settles on. "I was just doing what the Owl wanted."

It was more than that, though, more than following orders—though Harvey flashes to the solemn, meaningless majesty of the Nuremburg trials at the phrase and his twisted lip curls further; what exactly is the precedent worth, that states a man is not bound by an unjust order, nor released by it from personal responsibility? Barely anything even in law-abiding circles, when the unjust command was given by one still in power rather than a functionary of a defeated and reviled regime, not unless the obedient is being thrown to the wolves in his superior's place, and so what is law worth, really?

Jackson had the light of fanaticism in his eyes that day in court. He was willing to go to jail for life if his master required it. He would have committed any atrocity. Because he was _loyal._

"I'm thinking," Harvey declares after a second, when it seems like Jackson might be about to start proffering further excuses. "I could shoot you in the right side of the face right now, and go discuss this with your boss. Since it was all his idea, anyway. Since you were only following orders. But that wouldn't be exactly _symmetrical_, would it?" He takes his right hand away from stabilizing the weapon, and fishes his lucky double-headed coin from his breast pocket. "Good heads, lucky," he announces, and then turns the coin so the gunrunner can see the defaced side. "Bad heads, you aren't going to have one much longer."

"You're for real with this." The man doesn't seem able to believe that soft targets like (_former_) District Attorneys can also come after you personally.

Harvey has very little left to lose.

He flips the coin, and does not take his eyes off Brick as it spins through the air. The smuggler makes his move anyway, stupidly, as the lawyer reaches up to grab the half-dollar—throws himself aside, toward the foot Harvey's using to pin him down, getting his face out of the line of fire and very nearly knocking Harvey's legs out from under him.

But only almost. Harvey gets the bulk of his weight on the other foot just long enough to skip over Brick's moving body and keep his feet, and he could shoot him dead in the next second as the roll runs out against the legs of a chair, but he doesn't. He kicks him again. Not in the side, this time, but in the bleeding mess of his right thigh, and the mobster doubles up like clockwork. Harvey shoves him onto his back again, and plants his foot this time in the man's diaphragm, so that his slightest imbalance will rob Jackson of breath.

He was told, long ago, that the most effective street fighters aren't the strongest or the best-trained, but the ones who do not hesitate, who can go from stillness to fully committed violence in instants. He understood it then, abstractly, but now he is living it.

While his target gasps on the floor, he lays his lucky piece on the upper edge of his gun, since his hand is busy holding the weapon and he still needs to see what he flipped up.

Unmarred silver. The twisted side of his face grins. "Lucky you." He puts away the coin, takes several long steps back, and lowers the muzzle of the weapon to the flesh of Jackson's left leg.

_Bang!_

Symmetrical.

* * *

It takes him almost an hour and a half to get resettled. The double shotgun blasts, with a more normal gunshot between, were likely to draw _some_ kind of investigation _eventually_, even if it was just neighbors coming around to see if they could loot Brick's room if he was dead, but he didn't want his prisoner to bleed out or leave a blood trail, so he'd had to slap dressings on his legs before moving him into the car he'd bought (shabby, forgettable, paid with cash to a man who never saw his face) and bringing him here. Jackson regained consciousness on the floor of a rented room not unlike the one Harvey had plucked him from, chained to the foot of an iron bedstead by both arms.

Cuffing his feet together was probably overkill, considering the uselessness of both his legs, but Harvey doesn't want to take chances.

"Good morning," Harvey tells him, snapping on the two cheap steel lamps clipped to the bottom bed-rail in a rush of illumination that leaves the tiny patch of floor where Jackson's sprawled painfully bright, and the rest of the room in shadow. "Though, actually, it's still before midnight. And I have nowhere to be tomorrow, since I lost my job, so we really have all the time in the world to get to know each other better."

The hardened gunrunner's eyes widen a little, even despite his squinting in the sudden light, as he sees the kind of hardware Harvey's assembled for their conversation.

He's particularly proud of the welding torch, and the jar of clearly labelled hydrochloric acid.

An hour later, he hasn't learned as much as he'd like—there are things is seems like Jackson truly doesn't know, like who the Owl is and where he goes when he takes the mask off; other things he closes his teeth on and won't answer, and when Harvey kept pushing, he passed out again. When he came back around, Harvey proceeded with more caution. He's hardly an expert at this, and he'd hate to kill his subject with excessive haste.

Not that he's really doing this for the information, to be honest. That's just a bonus. It'll make it easier to go after the Owl after this—he doesn't imagine he'll be able to manage a long conversation with _him_, but odds are good that if he plans it right he can shoot the man in the face before anyone cuts him down.

It's not about the information. It's not about torture, either, not exactly. It's about revenge. It's about _balance._ It's about—if he can make Brick Jackson _understand_, he can get through to anyone. Harvey's had an epiphany. But he's not sure how to convey it outside the bounds of his head, yet, which is frustrating; he's not used to struggling with words. But he doesn't talk about feelings, much, let alone intuitive leaps, not without having already gone back along the path the leap carried him up, and filled in the supporting logic.

It's as though he's always been living in a kaleidoscope, but it was a stationary one and he stood staring into only one facet, one single mirror, and called the pattern he saw there, one fragment of the glory-colored patchwork reflections endlessly redoubled into mathematical precision, his all, and the simple truth. And now the kaleidoscope's been kicked, rolling and bouncing down a hill with Harvey still inside, tossed around anyhow with his eyes falling on mirror after not-yet-broken mirror as the bright beads shift with every instant, casting new exquisite patterns into the mirrored walls, and he can finally _see_—

There's a balance to the world. There really is, or at least there should be, but it isn't what he thought. What he told himself he believed in, even as he _knew_ what Bruce Wayne was complicit in, even as he saw how many innocent victims there were, who went all unavenged.

_I only ever bet on a sure thing, _but nothing is sure, nothing is certain; at any moment the ground might fall from under your feet and you might as well toss yourself into the current and let it fling you where it will. At least you'll have an interesting trip.

Justice is scarce in Gotham, and Harvey can't pretend he hasn't been complicit in that. Let things slide that should never be allowed; let ambition come ahead of duty. He was part of the problem.

(Thinks of that stubborn woman reporter throwing challenging questions in his face for years, speaking truth to power in the hope, maybe, that power might someday care enough to hear her.)

But there _is_ a balance, and things do come around. And he's going to make sure a few scales swing the right way.

Harvey sinks into the one rickety chair that came with the room, the one he discarded instantly for purposes of restraint. Restraint being what he's looking for as he sits, out of reach of Brick, out of reach of the shotgun he left on the bed; he can't lose control now, can't wake up in an hour or two to find he tore the man who burned his face off apart into bloody shreds and can't remember doing it. He is in control of this.

When his hands are steady again and he thinks he's capable of doing so without lashing out, he turns to look at his prisoner. Jackson's arms are hanging slack in the cuffs, and his head's lolled to one side, and his eyes are shut. Briefly, Harvey thinks he's lost consciousness again, but then he catches a shuttle of eye under lid. "I know you're faking, Brick," he says. "But I could pour water on you again, if you want."

He hasn't touched the man's face. Not yet. Every time he thinks about it, raises the razor to try it, he gets a sort of sick fluttery feeling through his chest and into his arms, and stops. Not time yet, he tells himself. Keep it as a threat. Keep building toward it, maybe make sure he's permanently lame, first, get him really, truly _scared, _get him to tell you everything you want to know, and _then—_

"How about it, Ricky," he says conversationally, turning to level a contemplative look at the ancient, grimy porcelain sink in one corner—bathrooms in this dump are communal, but tenants do get running water, for what it's worth. "I've heard about a method whereby I can effectively simulate drowning without actually killing you. Want to try?"

Jackson's breath hitches, and Harvey feels a pulse of satisfaction. He draws out his lucky coin again. "Look here," he says, and Jackson does, giving up his charade of unconsciousness. "I'll let you pick this time," Harvey tells him. "Good or bad?"

"What," Jackson rasps. Coughs a little. "What happens if I guess right?"

"It's almost like you've played this game before," Harvey muses. Jackson looks like he wants to spit at his feet but doesn't dare. He leans forward. "Call it right, and I won't try the drowning technique."

Jackson looks back at him. His eyes have changed, now. There's still disbelief lurking, but it's flatter and broader, and there's fear now, too, and a resignation Harvey recognizes. The growing acceptance that you've lost control of your life, and can't even pretend anymore.

But mostly they're still the dull, mean, calculating eyes of a career criminal who would never have been his own master no matter how long he'd lived, and they narrow on the defaced coin Harvey's holding up again for him to see. "Good," he says, and coughs again, searching Harvey to see how that choice is received.

Harvey shrugs. It makes no difference to him; chance wins over choice most of the time, anyway. He balances the coin on his thumb as he has a thousand times, and flicks it toward the spiderwebbed ceiling.

A split second later, Harvey stiffens, jerks his head around toward the gloom that's gathered in the end of the room near the painted-shut window. He's not sure if he heard something, or felt a draft, or just picked up the pressure of _something watching,_ but his neck prickles for a heartbeat as he tries to see through the dark—

A bone-white hand flashes from a part of the shadows he wasn't watching, and snatches the spinning bit of silver from the air, before it can land. Something in Harvey jolts, as though one of his major organs has been grabbed instead of his lucky coin, and he's on his feet before he knows it.

A white face leers into the light a moment later, and this time the jerking feeling inside is instinctive fear, of a wide red mouth showing what seem to be far too many teeth in a face that seems almost, but not quite, human. "Harvey Dent," says the face, and already fear has sunk again into more anger, because it's only the Jokester. Mad, of course, but not particularly _dangerous, _so far as any evidence has ever shown. "And Brick Jackson," he adds, with an equally cordial though somewhat perfunctory nod toward the prisoner, who glowers at him almost as balefully as Harvey is.

"Give that back," Harvey grinds out.

"What, this?" Jokester flicks the coin into the air and it spins brightly, before vanishing into that papery palm once again.

"Yes," he retorts, inches from tackling the clown if he keeps messing around. "That."

"I dunno…" Jokester opens his hand, and it's empty. "Seems to have gone missing."

"This is not a good night to play games with me," Harvey warns. If he attacks him _now,_ and takes him down, he'll have to search him thoroughly to figure out where he hid the damn thing, but that prospect won't hold him off for long. "Give it back." Once he has his coin back, he can address what Jokester is doing here and how he knew and what exactly he's playing at, but first things first.

"Or you'll tie me down and torture me, too?" the clown asks, clicking his tongue, and Harvey begins to understand why Bruce and Owlman expend _so much_ energy hunting this person.

"I could," he says, making it as dark a threat as his own deep voice will allow, and the other man shakes his head.

"See, I don't think you will, though."

"Haven't you heard?" Harvey asks. "I'm _unbalanced_."

"Good word for it," chuckles the clown. "But there's a difference between going after somebody who hurt you, and going after somebody who's just in the way, and I don't think you're past caring about that difference yet."

"Better hope I don't surprise you."

"True," says Jokester, and then skips forward, into Harvey's space enough that he draws back instinctively, putting the shotgun on the bed out of his reach, _stupid_, and trapping himself against the sink. He's three or four inches taller than the escaped lunatic, which leaves him looking down at a very white part through bizarre purple hair for a second before Jokester tips his face up to grin, and reaches up to pluck Harvey's coin from his acid-ruined ear. With his left hand, the one that _didn't_ catch the coin earlier, which Harvey admits is a nice touch, even as he snatches it back.

"There," says the clown. He leans over to flick on the overhead light fixture and falls back again in the new dim yellow glow toward the no-longer-hidden window, to sprawl onto the tall iron radiator that probably doesn't work. "Now we can have a civilized conversation, huh?"

Harvey closes his hand around the comforting familiarity of his lucky piece, the still-new scratches palpable against his palm. It's warm. It was probably up the man's sleeve, against his skin. "What the hell are you doing here?"

"I've got contacts," Jokester shrugs, as if that statement is boring. "And I can put pieces together. Nobody was taking credit for the hit on Brick here, and you were missing, and then I asked around a little, in the right places. To be honest, Harv, you aren't that inconspicuous."

He shoves that last remark aside. The detective work itself might not reflect any great ability, but the speed with which information apparently flows to this deranged outlaw is astounding, and if Harvey was still District Attorney he would probably be planning to deal with or take advantage of this factor in the future prosecution of Gotham's most ridiculous manhunt. "And _why_ are you _here?" _he asks again.

"You ever killed anybody?"

Harvey blinks, but the question isn't a departure from the subject, not really, even as it _is _a refusal to answer him. Or maybe it isn't even that, just a power play, answering questions with questions, and the first one to give in and answer loses. "How is that any of your business?"

"Me neither," Jokester replies, as though Harvey answered him in the negative. Twists his wrist, and flicks a suddenly existent quarter into the air. Just a normal quarter, copper and nickel, not Harvey's fancy, heavy old silver half-dollar, and it spins faster and higher for having so much less weight, glints brighter for being new. The clown keeps his eyes on it and his voice is all bland congeniality. "Come close a few times. It's a big decision, though. I mean, once you kill somebody, that's it. Forever."

Harvey tears his eyes off the bright spinning disk and the madman and takes the three steps to get the abandoned shotgun in hand again, and glance down at his prisoner. "I'm not exactly worrying about the state of my soul," he says drily, slipping his own coin into his breast pocket so he has two hands for the gun. Brick glares at him, but weakly. He's still losing blood. Harvey hopes he doesn't die while the clown keeps him arguing. He hasn't finished making his point.

Jokester snatches the quarter from the air and pushes his eyebrows up. "I actually meant for them. The murdered don't get do-overs."

Harvey draws back his lips to reply to the charge of murder, and lets the words collapse into a hiss, because this _would_ be murder, of course it would, legally. He's _prosecuted_ revenge killing cases. Open and shut. "So you're here to save this piece of scum?"

His challenge skates off an unconcerned shrug. "I can't actually stop you from killing him," says the clown. "I mean, yeah, _right now_ I probably could, not to brag or anything, but if you really want it, you'll go after him again. It'd be harder to get at him twice, but you'd probably manage it, especially if you don't care what happens to you after." He shifts, as though he's just noticed the top of a radiator is actually a pretty uncomfortable seat. "And honestly? I don't that much _care_ if he gets killed. It won't make a big difference either way, but world's prob'ly better off without him."

"And yet you took the trouble to track us down."

"Yeah, well." This shrug is a little less easy, and Jokester studies his toes for a second. "It wasn't that hard, like I said."

"If you don't care whether he survives," Harvey says, narrowing both good eye and bad, almost relishing the pain of flexing the burned skin, "then you came here because of me."

"Pretty much," the clown allows, and flips his hands outward as if shaking off embarrassment, but he's looking at Harvey again. "Murder…the thing about it is you take away all a person's choices forever. But it costs you, too."

"I don't have much left to lose."

That isn't true, though. He felt like it was, when he walked into this, but even without his office or his looks or his wife, he still has his freedom. No one's hunting him. He's a citizen, with all his rights intact. And…he isn't a murderer. Yet.

The mad clown smiles, like he can hear him thinking. "You, Harvey…you're pretty much a jerk."

Harvey lets out a sharp snort of something like amusement in spite of himself. "I would have sent you to prison," he says. "I would have sent you wherever Bruce Wayne wanted you."

"Isn't that up to the judge? I mean, if they ever even caught me. But yeah, like I said, you're a jerk. And, yeah, you were friends with Wayne, and I seriously question a lot of your priorities, policy-wise. So I don't exactly have a lot of reasons to like you, and it's not like you were hurting anyone I really care about protecting, so far."

"Yet here you are."

"For _you_." Jokester opens the hand he closed the quarter in and there's a little paper flower there, now. Origami camellia, not an inch and a half across. He frowns at it, as though it was advertised as the solution to a problem it is patently unfit to confront, and then vanishes it up his sleeve and looks back up. "I've been there, Harv." Jokester bends his head a little forward, and _doesn't_ touch the wreck of his own face in emphasis, which somehow makes it worse.

His eyes are so normal, Harvey realizes with a new twist to his stomach. There's some insanity there, yes, but right now he's calm and solemn enough, just a hint of a smile playing around the corners, that they're mostly just unremarkable, greenish-hazel human eyes, set into a distorted fright mask. "You get the bandages off and look in a mirror, and the doctor tells you it's not gonna get any better than this. It's forever. He _took your face_."

Is that what people will see when they look at him, from now on? Humanity and grotesquerie bundled together, lit with madness from within? Is that all he has to look forward to? His hands spasm on the gunstock, and he pulls his fingers further away from the trigger, as a precaution. Accidents aren't satisfying. Neither choice nor chance, not really, just stupidity. "I'm not you," he says.

"Revenge was all I could think about, too," Jokester answers, or maybe ignores him.

"You blew up seven warehouses full of contraband," Harvey recalls. It was what put the man on the map of law enforcement; word has it he was operating as a vigilante before his debut as a mad clown, but that iteration of the Red Hood never escalated to more than a rumor. Jokester made a big mark from the start.

"Put a bunch of his guys in the hospital, too, and I put together this acid-squirting flower thing that…yeah," the gangly man breaks off with a grimace, throws his weight back into the window frame in some sort of gesture of relinquishment when Harvey winces involuntarily. _Acid._ "I didn't actually use it on anyone, at least. It made a pretty good threat, especially with me as an example. Since then, though, I have to deal with a lot of extra headaches all the time, and the police keep hunting me like I'm the bad guy…"

He shakes his head. "I had less to lose than you, but that doesn't mean I don't wish I'd been a little less messy. And I had people there for me, making sure I didn't go too far." He meets Harvey's eyes again. "Make sure you know what you really want. That's all I'm saying."

"And if I'm sure what I want is to kill Jackson slowly and go after his boss, you'll walk away and let me?"

"Hell no."

Jokester's eyes go wide a second later, and he raises both hands to gesture surrender, the shotgun levelled on his chest. A shotgun blast there, at this range, would be much less survivable than several ordinary bullets. There wouldn't be enough whole tissue left to stitch back together, even if he got medical treatment immediately. Which he wouldn't.

"So we come back to this: you're in my way."

"Harv." There's no madness in those infuriatingly human eyes now, not that he can see, except that he can't find any fear, so the apparent sanity is the craziest thing of all. "Go home. This isn't the end for you. You've got so much to live for. Don't throw yourself away."

"I can't go back." It's more than the memory of Gilda coating every surface in that house. It's more than losing his position and reputation. "I'm not that man anymore."

"Okay." Not pacifying, especially. Jokester's reinvented himself at least once; maybe he does think this makes perfect sense. "But that doesn't mean whoever you are now deserves to get trash-binned. I bet he's worth at least as much as the last guy ever was."

_And what was he worth, do you think?_ Harvey wants to snarl, but doesn't. Maybe he doesn't want to hear the answer. He turns his back, instead. Glares down at his…prisoner.

He can't bring himself to think 'victim.' Because Jackson deserved all of this and ten times as much, for what he did to Harvey, for what he's done to so many others, and what the guns he brought in did. The children shot, or watching their parents bleeding out, or simply orphaned on the street. Every drop of blood Owlman has wrung from people who did nothing to deserve it but be poor, and vulnerable, and within his reach.

For everything Harvey never did to stop him, and all his kind.

(Thinks of Vicki Vale again, the way she stormed forward to help him without hesitating, he who had never earned anything from her; this wasn't what she saved him for, he knows. Thinks, against his will, of Gilda, and the thought of her horrified look stokes the fire in his chest again but it's cold comfort, now.)

"How did it come to this?" he asks, and only realizes he said it aloud once he's already done it.

He hears the Jokester's feet hit the floor, and he pads a little closer, but stops before Harvey has to get tense, or turn around. "That's a good question," says the strange, slightly cracked tenor voice that sounds both much more noticeably not-quite-right and much more normal, when you can't see the face that goes with it. "But a better one is…where is it going from here?"

And he doesn't have an answer.

Jackson's eyes have fallen closed, and he's breathing in gulps again, even though Harvey hasn't touched him since before they were interrupted.

His hands tighten around the gunstock, and he slides his finger back inside the trigger guard. Enough. Time to end this, the only way it ever could end. Having your head blown off might not be clean, but at least it has to be quick.

"Harvey."

Jokester says it quietly. Understandingly. Like they're friends.

His voice sounds like a weird echo of Bruce, when he called Harvey's name as he climbed out of the limo on his seventh wedding anniversary, and gave a recommendation Harvey didn't understand was meant as an ultimatum. He doesn't turn his head.

"You can go now," he says.

"You know I can't."

And now Harvey _does _look, even though he doesn't want to. There's such sympathy in the horribly sane madman's face. His aggravating, hideous, presumptuous face, and half of Harvey wants to snap his gun around and fire and blow him away.

But the blood and the last wheeze of shredded lungs; Harvey's never seen someone die like that but he's seen so many, many crime scene photos entered as evidence in so many, many cases where he fought to get justice for the dead, and he's got the fresh blood to look at right here, drying into Jackson's clothes and the wooden floor. And Jokester's right, damn him. He's not so far gone he can kill someone for getting in his way.

His eyes fall back onto the drips of blood, and drag themselves up to the body that shed them, and so long as they don't drift above the neck to recognize the object of his hate he can see it as just another crime scene, as remote as an evidential photograph, and as condemning.

Wonders if _that_ was why he could not bring himself to touch Jackson's face—not because it was going too far, not because he couldn't do to anyone else what had been done to him, but because if a mask of blood or bubbling burn had turned the man unrecognizable, Harvey would no longer have been able to believe his own justifications.

The words _what have I done? _fall into his head all of a single piece, one solid-forged question, and they fit there in a slot perfectly shaped for them, carved out with every move of the razor, every drip of weak acid over a fresh wound, every lick of the torch on metal to get it hot enough to cauterize as it cut.

He doesn't say them.

He stands silent, instead. Watching this man who was the tool to ruin him breathe.

"If I let him go," he says, "he'll be able to testify I tortured him." Too late to back out now.

"He could," Jokester agrees, bright and easy. "But he won't. Not unless he wants Owlman to know about the payoffs he took to redirect ammo shipments to the Jade Dragon gang. Isn't that _right_, Bricky-boy?"

The world sways under his feet, pieces falling apart into new patterns. New possibilities, laid out at his feet.

"You're blackmailing him?" It takes Harvey a few seconds to get through the shock and (utterly hypocritical) affront at the idea, and see that it won't work. "_Somebody_ has to have done it, and I'm the obvious suspect, with no alibi and an official diagnosis of mental instability."

"_Aha,_ you miss the full brilliance of my plan. Hey, Brick," he says, giving Jackson's shoulder a little shake, winning his full, slightly bleary attention. "I'm gonna take you to a hospital, and if you're lucky they'll fix you up good enough you'll still be able to walk once you've had some recovery time. Now, if you want your feathery boss to not hear about you fleecing him—huh, that sounds weird, maybe 'downing?' Nah, that's what you do to a drink. Anyway, things are gonna start getting better for you starting from now, and if you want them to not get way, _way_ worse again, you just tell anyone who asks that all this was me. Mr. Dent never came anywhere near you. Isn't that right?"

There's some hatred in Jackson's eyes, and definitely resentment, but mostly just pain, and relief, and maybe the edge of something like gratitude. He nods. "Yeah, you freak show," he agrees weakly. "No problem. Long as word never gets back to the Owl or the cops 'bout witnesses like the folks who ratted to _you_."

"It won't," the clown declares, with perfect assurance.

Brick narrows his eyes, but nods again, sharply in acceptance. Nothing is less constant than interest, as the sociologist said, but apparently Brick's mad loyalty goes only so far. He would go to prison rather than turn evidence against the Owlman, but that was because he feared the consequences of open betrayal, not because he places his boss's wellbeing above his own. And that means that, for as long as it remains in Brick's interests to keep the secret, their little conspiracy will be safe.

And unless it fails some other way, the fact of the conspiracy _existing _is enough to keep its secrecy in Brick's interest, even without the threat about his embezzlement.

"Good!" White hands move to adjust the dressings on Brick's legs, then, tightening the one on the more serious injury on the left with a delicate care that doesn't match the clown's attitude, or his declared lack of interest in whether or not the scumbag dies. "Any ribs broken?" he asks, prodding at them, and apparently concluding not. "Okay, you're stable to transport. Hey, Harvey," Jokester says, turning to him again, casual as if they were friendly office colleagues taking off for the weekend. (Not that Harvey had had a whole weekend off in recent memory, until very recently.) "Can I borrow your car?"

It takes Harvey a minute to be able to respond. He's still trying to process that this is real. "You're…you're going to take the fall for me."

"Yeah. Well, not the _fall,_ hopefully, just the rap, but I'm already wanted for lots of things. You've got a lot more to lose, still, Harv. Let me do this."

Harvey swallows. The seething self-awareness that's been troubling him more and more since—the non-accident, since Gilda, since _something_—seems to have gone into sharp, high definition, and he knows very well that whatever the mad clown says, taking this on isn't nothing. Most of what he's wanted for is destruction of property. Criminal negligence. This…what Harvey's done is on a whole different level.

"I don't deserve this," he says. The words inadequate to encompass their own truth.

The Jokester heaves a sigh, shoulders slumping dramatically. "Harvey. The way I see it…all you gotta do to deserve being helped is need helping. If there's earning to be done at all…it happens after. When somebody else needs something you can give 'em." He straightens up, briskly waving a hand. "Besides, it's not like I won't be able to spin this into something useful. Give me a sike-o-_logikal _edge, y'know? So, can I borrow your car?"

Harvey lets the breath out of his lungs, and then digs into his pocket. "You can _have_ it," he answers, tossing over the keys. "It cost three hundred dollars and I'm never going to use it again."

"Three hundred from a stranger and it runs?" Jokester marvels, carefully hoisting Jackson up onto his back in an awkward modified fireman's carry that puts most of the weight on his torso but doesn't let his legs swing. "Come on, Brick. Let's get in the stolen car Harvey bought and get you some surgery and good drugs."

He grins at Harvey, then, and while madness still twinkles in his eyes, Harvey thinks he looks a lot more human than he did before. Maybe it's just about learning how to look. "Wait like twenty minutes before you come out, okay? And then go home. You're gonna be okay."

And with that promise, the two of them are gone, and it's just Harvey, alone in a room with the truth.


	35. Dent IIa: Edge

Dent IIa: 'Edge'

**_A/N: _**_Note to self: never update on a Monday. At least, I hope that was what happened to last chapter; if the low reviewer turnout was a response to the fic itself, I'm going on hiatus because I clearly need new priorities, and possibly a meditative retreat. You know when I started this, there was a rule that chapters should not be more than two thousand words? Hah. _

* * *

Harvey does go home. Tidies what he can manage of the mess he made of the front hall, the bedroom, and the stairs (not, to his slight surprise, Gilda's abandoned studio, and he faces one of the paintings she left behind for a whole minute before he has to turn away) until the adrenaline has begun to settle and the tension begun to fade under the monotony of piling broken wood into his arms and carrying it down to the rarely-used fireplace in the drawing room.

He lights a fire from the unmendable shards of what was really some very nice furniture, and makes himself a sandwich, and pours himself a double shot of whiskey, and settles down on the sofa facing the fireplace, trying not to think too much.

* * *

A week later, a man in a greatcoat and a fedora, with his face hidden under a mask that is black on the left and white on the right, and sheer enough to see through where it stretches over his eyes, steps out of the mouth of an alley and punches one of the Owl's legbreakers so hard that the man crumples into unconsciousness, entirely interrupting his intended activity of taking a blackjack to the back of the Jokester's head.

A pistol is shoved into the masked man's face by one of the collapsing thug's cohorts, and he grabs it, twists it until it's pointing at nothing but the ceiling, then raps that man across the wrist with the blackjack he took off the first one. There's a crack, and Harvey gets the gun off him and takes advantage of the opening so created to land what should be a very painful kick.

He has a gun of his own in a shoulder holster, but he doesn't intend to use it except in truly dire extremity. Escalation never leads anywhere good.

"Hey there!" Jokester cackles, weaving under another gun and jabbing the man who holds it in the gut. "Glad you could make it!"

Like he'd been issued an invitation. Like he was _expected._ Is that a joke, or another uncanny moment of insight, or just a headgame—and if so, with whose head?

But it's hard to suspect the man of toying with him as they fall to fighting, back to back, and Harvey knows the cooperation's not his doing, it's all the Jokester, maneuvering around his attacks and covering his back and calling out warnings like they've done this a dozen times before. Harvey's grateful for the wild, unquestioning insanity of it, because he knows that if he stops to think about what he's doing he'll realize how unqualified he is and what a terrible, risky idea this was, and then he won't have that coin-not-yet-fallen absoluteness that's all he has to make him dangerous, and then he'll be no use at all.

A police siren begins to draw near as they win the fight, and Harvey glances at his ad-hoc partner, who grins up at him, sidelong, and gives a jerk of the head up the boulevard.

They run, together, the smaller man laughing as he runs in brief, yelping gasps that are all he can spare the air for, and Harvey can't even spare that, because for all he has longer legs he can barely keep up, until they've left the unconscious bully-boys and the shaken shopholder and the police far behind, and Jokester collapses against a chain-link fence with a great _whoof!_

Grins again, slyly under his ridiculous purple eyebrows. "Didn't 'spect to see you quite this soon, Dent," he says, with a teasing twinkle.

Harvey feels awkward, suddenly, a kid dressed up in his father's clothes. Clenches his fingers in the sleeve of his coat. "Uhm. I made a mask."

"I noticed." Jokester tilts his head to one side, then the other. Holds up thumb and forefinger at right angles, like he's framing a scene. "It's nice. Sort of Art Deco, sort of lunar…you wanna stick a couple contrasting dots on and go for a taijitu?"

Harvey's mouth drops open under the fabric, and then he starts to laugh. He laughs until he cries a little, and glances up to find Jokester waiting, completely patient, wearing a crooked little smile and doing a thing with his hands that seems to say '_I don't know how I pulled off being quite that funny, but I'll take it.'_

It's a good thing he isn't pushing to know, because Harvey doesn't want to explain. Artistic commentary had been part of his life so long it had passed from the realm of vaguely annoying into simply a facet of existence years and years ago, and then it packed its bags and left. And then to have it pop up here, the last place he would have expected, when he's _starting over_…the Jokester reminded him of Gilda, and the thing is, the really ridiculous, utterly hilarious thing is…it didn't hurt. He thought of her, and for the first second it didn't hurt.

It's going to take a while. He's perfectly aware of that. The betrayal is never going to completely leave him, even. But he's going to get better.

He can't go back. But he can, he really, truly _can _go forward.

"Couldn't you just call it a yin-yang?" he asks, when he's finally stopped laughing, patting a little at his face so the couple of tears will soak into the mask and get on with evaporating instead of making him itch. The bad side itches enough on its own.

He means the question. _Everybody_ says yin-yang. Archeologists studying the Etruscans say yin-yang. If you'd asked Harvey what the Chinese word for the symbol was, he couldn't have told you, although he _had_ heard it at least once before, so the context was enough. He wouldn't have pegged the clown for the technically precise type, or even the type to fuss over cultural sensitivity.

Jokester shudders. "I have a Taoist friend who'd hang me up for the crows if she heard me do that. No fear."

Fair enough. "And I don't care for the Gotham Herald naming me Ying-Yang Face, so no."

The smaller man laughs out loud, at that, and swings his long-handled hammer up to rest easily over his shoulder. "Prob'ly a good call. You're in for the long haul, then?"

"Yeah." Harvey fingers the coin in his pocket, feeling his thumbnail catch in the grooves he added. "I've got…a lot of paying to do."

Paying back Jokester for saving him from his own blindness. Paying back everyone he ran roughshod over in his conviction that his walk of life was the only one that really mattered. Paying back Owlman for what he took, and Bruce Wayne for his betrayal.

And paying forward. He lost everything. But he has a second chance.

And he'll do better this time.

No matter what.

"Well, my skull owes you one already. Good to have ya onside." The mad clown claps him on the shoulder, again like they're friends, like he's already forgotten everything he has reason to hate about him, and Harvey wonders if his actual friends get any warmer treatment than people he's just being friendly with.

Thinks they probably do, just from the way the man said _I had people there for me._

He pulls out his lucky half-dollar, balances it on his thumbnail, and gives it a practiced _flick,_ with no concern for throwing it too high and having it bounce off the ceiling, since they're out under the sky. Jokester follows the arc up with his eyes, silent, and is still silent when Harvey catches it in one black leather glove, lays it flat on the back of the opposite wrist.

Only after he's looked at the scarred side for a full breath and a half does Jokester say, musingly, "That's _gotta_ have put a gouge in the collector's value." He huffs out a small laugh, like he's made some kind of obscure private joke rather than just a terrible pun, and looks up at Harvey's masked face, instead, with only a few sparks of madness in his friendly eyes. "But that doesn't make it _worth_ less."

Harvey swallows, and ducks his chin. Takes another, longer breath, and puts the coin away, reminding himself to ask the Jokester to teach him how to do the coin-disappearing trick sometime. "I'm selling my house," he says, not sure why, but wanting to say it.

When he was getting the house listed, he noticed for the first time something he'd always known: that his was the only name on the deed. That he'd been coming home to Gilda painting in _his_ house, not _theirs,_ and never realized it might matter. And for the first time, he felt he _understood _why his wife had left him. Not just because he'd become ugly, not just because he was losing his mind. Because he was, as a matter of fact, a colossal self-righteous _bastard._

It's too late to make things right with Gilda—she won't even see him again to sign the papers; her lawyer says she's already left the country, and won't say where to, and Harvey wonders if she's really that scared of him, or if it's mostly shame.

Jokester nods, assimilating this information with consciously-ironic gravitas. "I could really go for some pie," he announces, as if imparting this truth constitutes some sort of exchange.

Before Harvey can think of anything to respond to this, or more than vaguely summon the theory that he may have accidentally begun some sort of inanity contest (which he is clearly foredoomed to lose), the clown continues, "there's a little diner up on fifth, has bottomless coffee for a dollar fifty and does a cherry pie like somebody's really-good-at-baking mom, and the staff are all my pals. You wanna join me?"

"That sounds…pretty swell," Harvey says, almost pulling off casual, after a second spent swallowing down a lump of pure relief.

"You bet it does," Jokester declares proudly, and marches them off up a narrow street whose sign appears to have been stolen.

"So," the clown asks, as they walk, "what _are_ you thinkin' you'll call yourself?"

Harvey shrugs, wondering if he should take his mask off now, or wait until pie arrives. No point just rolling it up to the nose to eat, when his distinctive scarring would be perfectly recognizable from chin alone. "Still working on that."

"Want me to help you brainstorm?" he sounds excited as a puppy, and Harvey raises his eyebrows.

"No offense, but you have purple hair and wear a green suit, and wanted me to dress as Ying-Yang Face."

The man whose disconcerting wisdom and self-sacrifice saved Harvey from himself mere days ago pokes out his strangely-normal tongue, and blows a raspberry. "Fine, then. _Don't_ ask for my input."

Harvey shrugs, as they round a corner and his guide orients toward what must be their destination, shabby and aluminum-sided, tucked under the track of the west elevated extension, bearing a bright, freshly-retouched sign that says _Louise's_. "I have a feeling I'm going to be getting it anyway."

The latch to Louise's diner clicks open, the door swings wide, a hanging string of bells jangles; the Jokester laughs. "Well, you're not wrong."

And that is, as a matter of fact, okay.


	36. Cicero

'Cicero'

_**A/N: **Thanks so much to everyone who reviewed last chapter! It really means a lot. I mean, I love all you lurkers, too, but I never know what you're thinking. So, having dedicated most of February to Harvey's metamorphosis, now for something completely different._

* * *

**GothamFireman76:** So are you guys behind whatever's up with the Owls? Heat Sink says she saw Talon _carrying_ Himself onto a speedboat last night.

**whyaren'tyousmiling:** you mean their headless chicken impression? sadly, no. not us.

**whyaren'tyousmiling: **our local expert says it looks like civil war's broken out.

**GothamFireman76: **Civil war? Half the gang are just sitting around with their thumbs up their asses. I've got a serial arsonist here got everything set to burn down First Baptist &amp; then didn't put the light because he couldn't get the okay from up top!

**whyaren'tyousmiling:** they'll get dragged in before long. but it's not a gang war. somebody's making a play for the _Court._

**GothamFireman76:** Hood's sure about this?!

**whyaren'tyousmiling:** pretty. get your boss to sniff around his social set, see if any cracks are showing on the surface? be good to figure out who's got the brass ones to challenge the psycho on his own turf and send him showing tailfeathers. y'know, soon.

**GothamFireman76: **Mothman's not my boss.

**whyaren'tyousmiling: **srry, my mistake. can he go reconnoiter the rich people parties anyway?

**GothamFireman76:** Yeah, yeah.

* * *

_[From the desk of the Deputy Commissioner of Police, Gotham]:_

Commissioner,

Permission to issue a PSA of gang activity in neighborhoods including the Gotham Heights, and advise a curfew? Frankly, sir, gang activity is what we _hope_ it is; the swamp lights miles from all swampland and mysteriously appearing giant patches of blood would be provoking hysteria in the inner city, never mind this far north. It's going to look even worse if we do nothing until good citizens have already started disappearing, than if we suggest the gang violence is spilling out of the slums. Crisis management.

And Mr. Wayne still isn't answering his calls, sir. Sorry. No one's seen him in days. I'm sure he'll understand you tried your best to contact him.

* * *

_From (xxx) xxx-xxxx __**Eddie**__ 10:57 PM_: prtty sre jst sw Tln w/ THE CAT rf hpping 2wrd Brstol near Westwrd Brdg. O_O?!

_To (xxx) xxx-xxxx __**Eddie **__11:04 PM_: yeah, waylon saw em too. question is, is his boss dead and he's going into jewel theft, or is the big bird tucked away somewhere safe?

* * *

_Fuck it to fucking hell, he's __**back**__. Red Hood to Circus, damn it! Something big's going down tonight, guys; be ready to contain fallout. Fuck you, Drake, you shitfucking moron; had him incapacitated in a boat I'd have pushed him over the fucking side and kept fucking sailing into the sunset you pathetic little weas—[transmission cuts out]_

* * *

_From (xxx) xxx-xxxx __**Eddie **__2:14 AM_: Tln is fghtn OTHER TLNS?! is hrvy shttng me, j, wht n th actl hll?

_To (xxx) xxx-xxxx __**Eddie **__2:20 AM: _struth. hood says a courtier once told him talons never die; they keep the mentally unstable ones unconscious in coffins. looks like maybe not a lie. weve got eyes on him; try to focus on keeping people from turning into collateral damage.

_From (xxx) xxx-xxxx __**Eddie **__2:49 AM: _fnd corpse. so i guess jsn's bn tld bein cut nto 6 pcs &amp; set n fire enuff 2 kll hm?

* * *

_Heads are still spinning in the aftermath of Gotham's most sensational murder in many years. As reported by this publication in the early edition, Marine Captain Kathryn 'Kate' Kane of the Gotham Kanes was found dead at 6:10 in the morning in front of the Robinson Square Fountain. Reliable sources have since confirmed that the Captain's body was laid out spread-eagled, with her throat savagely cut, dressed in an armoured owl costume with the feathered wings spread out around her, and the mask pulled back to expose her face._

_Police Commissioner Loeb reports that his department is doing their utmost to get to the bottom of this 'dire event.' Colonel Jacob Kane, closest living relative and former legal guardian of the deceased, has called the situation "tragedy compounded by slander," but has refused further comment._

_Official military sources have likewise declined comment, but one Marine speaking on condition of anonymity reports that Kane was "one of the toughest officers I've served with, and definitely the scariest woman. Murdering her—that's not a job for an amateur. Don't know what's up with the bird suit, though."_

_Reached for comment, our own Bruce Wayne calls the loss of Captain Kane "a tragic waste."_

_Asked whether he thinks his second cousin could have been the notorious crimelord Owlman, whom many still dismiss as an urban legend, Wayne says, "Anything is possible, and Kate would have liked passing for a man, but I doubt it. If nothing else, she was deployed away from Gotham most of the time. It's much more likely she ran afoul of him somehow."_

_The billionaire adds, "I'm sure our fine police force will get to the bottom of the case before long."_

"_Kate always seemed so serious," says the captain's only living first cousin, tennis star Bette Kane. "Hard-headed, I mean. Practical. It's hard to believe she could have been involved in anything that—_weird._"_

_This reporter also reached another second cousin, Adeline Kane Wilson, who forbore to comment on the shocking death while the investigation is ongoing, and claims little knowledge of the deceased. "On the surface of it, Kate and I had a lot in common," says the former First Lady and Army captain, who now runs a well-regarded international detective firm, "but we never quite saw eye to eye."_

_It is not yet known whether Captain Kane will be accorded a military funeral._

* * *

Jacob,

Stop playing these games. You knew the risks when you goaded your niece into challenging me.

You survive because you are useful. Trust that if you attempt to misuse your influence any further, your body will not be exposed to public observation—or, indeed, ever seen again.

Please recall the oaths you took with slightly more pretense of sincerity.

* * *

_Timothy—_

_I am sorry urgent business kept me away when I knew you were due for your customary infiltration. I have followed your recent adventures with interest, and must say that I hope your present teacher appreciates your loyalty. _

_Sincerely,_

_Ra's_

* * *

_**A/N: **__More Tim Drake peeking in around the edges! That is definitely his preferred mode of appearing. So, noting for clarity, Kate Kane, the most recent Batwoman, canonically thrown out of West Point because when asked, she told. Since this seems to have been a matter of principle I figure Evil Kate felt no reason to do the same, so she has an actual career. ^^ The Gotham Kanes are a hideous continuity snarl, and where/if Bruce and Adeline fit into the family tree is profoundly unclear and subject to repeated retcon, but I say yes, because it's more fun that way. (Bette is also known as the C-list hero Flamebird; I guess I should make her a villain at some point.)_

_Feel proud of Firefly, by the way. He got through that whole instant-message conversation without forgetting to use codenames even once._


	37. Cold Trail

'Cold Trail'

_**A/N: o.o **__Wow. I was blown away by the reviews this week. :D I _still_ love all you lurkers…and everybody who recently awesomely de-lurked, and all of you long-term reviewers, and the folks who just joined us! ^^ You are swell. Digital hugs. And possibly cake.  
_

_This seems like a promising note on which to close out one year of posting. Thank you! (And to anon **DarkSeraphim1**, good lord! Thank you for pointing out Jason hasn't actually appeared since chapter 20! How did that even happen? There will probably be a high concentration of Jason chapters in the near future.)_

_My timeline informs me 'Beware the Court of Owls' happened in early summer 2001. It is now autumn. This is the DCU and the #1 threat to America is supervillains, and I already made Adeline responsible for knocking heads together in her husband's administration to make the spooks share information, so we'll say 9/11 was foiled and the White House murders are the Bad Thing that happened to America that year._

_(Due to my not paying close enough attention to Grayson while finalizing various important details, my timeline _also_ claims that the fourteen years he spent as Talon somehow took from 1980 to 2001. Eheh. I consider this bizarre relationship with time to be a semi-canon superpower of Dick's anyway, and it's too late to change it now. If this infuriates anyone into ragequitting, I completely understand.)_

* * *

"**A child created to be a plaything for men—such a thing has existed; such a thing exists even now."**

* * *

It was the September of the year 2001.

Grayson, who had been Talon, had set himself one task before he left the continent: he would discover where his sire and dam had taken themselves in the years since selling him to the dark, and he would go to them and look them in the eyes and ask them why.

And if they could give no sufficient reason, he would cut their hearts out, because they did not deserve them.

It was not a wise goal, he was aware. He was a wanted man. The government, at least, was looking in all the wrong places, because he had so obviously been a professional backed by a powerful organization, and they had no reason to suspect he had broken with his patron that same night and gone fleeing the District of Columbia on foot, relying for disguise entirely on a hooded sweatshirt and a minor change of hairstyle. Still, Slade Wilson had looked him in the naked face and seen him all too well, and the resulting police sketch was unsettlingly accurate.

It was fortunate in this case that he had no particularly recognizable feature, such as a slanted eye or drooping lip. So far as he could determine, the most striking quality of his face was considered to be its beauty, and that was not a quality that inspired doubt in his motives. The face had grown a short, messy beard while he'd been in the Canadian wilderness, which had technically concealed it, but made people regard him with suspicion, so he'd done away with it.

Except for a small patch at the end of his chin which, in combination with steadily lengthening hair (he felt rather ridiculously rebellious _not_ keeping it to a constant length, considering how many other ways he had defied his training recently) allowed him to give the impression of an artsy student, roadtripping cross-country.

He had allowed others to put this story together for him, piece by piece, fellow bus passengers and motorists daring enough to accept a hitchhiker. The overweight man in the pickup truck who had been so convinced that he must be studying art had turned out to be a predator of some kind; Grayson was not sure what he had intended to follow upon his attempt at strangulation, but he was dead now. It had been a wrench, not stealing the truck, but driving a dead man's truck was too likely to draw attention once the body was found, a factor he could not control without more time and resources than the vehicle was worth. Escaping the scene without being observed had been enough trouble.

The fat man was the first person he had ever killed because he wanted to—Grayson was not sure whether he would have spared him, given the opportunity, but once he had broken the man's wrist and pinned him helpless to the seat of his own truck in instants, it had been impossible to let him go spreading the story. The act did not trouble him, but the fact that he had made his choice for reasons of survival niggled slightly, as though it was a bone healed crooked, in need of rebreaking.

His freedom was incomplete, so long as he was in hiding, but what could be done? It was what it was.

In spite of the beard, he had had one or two people think they recognized him, in diners and at rest stops across the country, but in each case they had been certain he was an actor of some sort, that they had seen him in some picture or TV special, hang on, it was on the tip of their tongue. (The beard helped, but his true secret was smiling. The face of his line-drawing was dead, more so than many corpses he had made, and as long as he did not hold their eyes too long the smile he had developed removed his living face far enough from that of the assassin Wilson remembered to fool any average observer entirely. Careful practice in public washrooms had allowed him to learn a natural-looking expression that provoked no fear; he felt strangely accomplished when he determined the technique adequately mastered. It was, he realized eventually, the first thing he had ever taught himself because he wanted to know it.)

Even if he ever was recognized, however, he was confident in his ability to evade at least the first few waves of response, and almost certainly to outdistance the rest. Going unseen was his specialty.

No, barring a stroke of particularly ill fortune, it wasn't Wilson's search he was wary of, despite the vast mechanisms of law the President had grinding in his service.

Owlman, though. His former master would have noticed his absence within days; within weeks determined to some degree of certainty that no one had captured his weapon and proceeded to secretly hold it, as he queried his sources embedded in various bureaus and syndicates. By now he would have confronted the likely probability that his Talon had betrayed him.

And if he had done that, then it was not any great stretch to presume that some spark of the Richard-Grayson-that-had-been survived. So wherever the Graysons Sr. had betaken themselves, it was likely the Owl had an agent in place awaiting his approach. Though now, eleven weeks after the fact, that watch would probably have slackened. He would approach with all due caution.

Once he found out where they _were_.

His skills for tracking a target through his or her paper trail were mostly oriented toward recent relocations. Additionally, they had usually relied to some degree on Owlman's resources, and had never been particularly hampered by the possibility that his search might draw undesirable attention. This trail was over ten years cold, and his quarry's last known location was in Gotham City, a place which by his own will he would never approach again.

After some thought, he used a computer in a public library to investigate the recent careers of several circuses, including (the only one he was actually interested in) Jack Haley's, which turned out to be currently touring North Africa, for some reason. He was oddly heartened to see it was still doing well. To his utter lack of surprise, the Flying Graysons were no longer with them.

To his rather greater surprise, he could not find any sign of their having been at any time in the last thirteen years.

* * *

"_Mary," John said, his voice pitched low so that it carried a long way, but had almost lost the shape of her name before it reached her. She turned, from where she'd been standing over the narrow foldaway bunk that had had no occupant for seventeen days, to see him silhouetted against the door. "Jack's packing up," he stated._

_Hands chafing against one another, as they had been so constantly for so long they had begun to peel free the thick callus where the trapeze rubbed, she nodded. "Of course he is," she said._

"_He _wants_ to stay."_

_Mary nodded._

"_He does. We're practically family to him, you know that. There's a patch of trailer park with utilities out on the outskirts that we've got for free for the next three months if we need it, because of a call he made. It's just…you can't eat good will."_

_For the first time in days, she smiled, though it was a thin, washed-out thing. "I'm not the one you have to convince," she said._

"_Yeah," John admitted, climbing inside the narrow caravan, shoulders slumping. There was exhaustion in every line of him, but still even now grace, unconscious, unthinking, in the way he took each step up, and the way he reached back to close the door. "But Jack sure isn't going to listen."_

"_This circus is his family legacy," said Mary. Who understood that, even if it was her husband who was circus by birth; she'd been raised to be aware of legacies, and what it meant to squander them. "It's what he loves most in the world." And he loved them for being part of it, and would love them still when they weren't anymore because they _had_ been, and were therefore (unless they ever betrayed him) family always, but he couldn't let the circus come to bits just for one part of it. He'd find new fliers before long, and work around the lack until then._

_John almost reached out for her hand, but pulled back at the last moment. Mary closed her eyes, but didn't reach out to complete the connection. Not right now._

* * *

Grayson left town hurriedly after that library visit, knowing he might have aroused some suspicion and needing to be well away before the King of Owls could get eyes on the spot. Not that the Court had much presence in Wisconsin.

It was a comfort, in some ways, that it had not yet been a whole three months since his defection; even if there was a new Talon in training, they could not yet be prepared to be sent hunting him. So long as his trail was only unclear suspicions, Bruce Wayne would not spare the time to chase such vague leads in person, and that was the only possibility he truly feared, anymore.

The Courtiers had been dangerous when he was small and to some degree terrifying ever since, but they had made a razor-keen weapon of him with their roughness as whetstone, and he knew full well he could kill any dozen of them, and outrun any mercenary they were likely to send.

In an Applebee's in South Dakota, he managed to get the crinkling around the eyes close enough to _right_ to make his waitress blush.

Chicago Public Library archived seemingly every newspaper in the country. Delving into their microfiche collection was more likely to cause him to be remembered by the librarian than merely using the internet, but less likely to ping any Owl monitoring software, so unless the woman was some sort of embedded operative the trade-off was acceptable, and in his professional opinion, she was not.

It took a while to find the right Gotham Herald back issues, even knowing that he could ignore the last thirteen years.

Eventually, tucked deep in the Entertainment section for September of the year he was six, he found the colorful quarter-page Haley's Circus ad featuring 'The Flying Graysons!' as the banner-header, with a dynamic line-drawing of a family of three.

Was he really so small, when that life ended?

(He thought that if this were a real paper instead of microfiche, he'd steal that page. Was that weakness? And if so, what kind?)

* * *

_Usually, John was the talker. Mary was perfectly capable of conversation and presentation, but it was John who had a knack for patter, words rolling off his tongue to charm and tease, tailored by instinct to his audience. And sometimes he talked too much, or talked around and around his intended subject, but the fact remained: at least until Dick got old enough to make use of the instincts he'd clearly inherited, John was the family front man. _

_Since—what had happened—though, Mary had come to the fore. It might have been nothing but the fact that a worried mother made better television, to begin with, but over the weeks John had fallen more and more into the background, a washed-out shadow at her shoulder._

_Until one day, after they left the police station with no news to speak of, she turned around, sharply, looked the few inches up and said, "Which of us is it?"_

_John blinked at her, no answer coming to his lips._

"_Are you blaming me, or yourself? Don't think I don't know you, John Maxwell Grayson."_

_Her husband's eyes closed against her expression, and he folded his arms in toward his stomach like he was going into a forward roll, the way Dick always used to do when he was scared. It probably came from flying before you learned to crawl. _

"_I wish I knew."_

* * *

His disappearance, Grayson found, had been a news item. Much more prominent than the arrival of the circus; in fact, he made the front page, though top billing was lost to some sort of political scandal in which he had no interest. There was a photograph of him, not the smiling headshot common in kidnapping cases but a picture captured in motion with what must have been a very fast camera, plunging feetfirst toward a trampoline as he straightened out of what had clearly been a midair flip, the positioning of his arms almost, but not quite, perfect.

Grayson had never seen such a happy child.

This might not signify greatly, since a majority of the children he had had occasion to observe had been cowering, dying, or, more recently, in the midst of the stressful parts of road trips, but he had spied on family units in peaceful circumstances in the past. This…how could that ever have been him? He tore his eyes from the hateful image to read the two hundred words accorded to the story on the front page, and then followed instructions to turn to page A5 for further information.

From the news story he learned that the event of which he had only the haziest recollections had come to pass on an August 17, fourteen years earlier. According to their own testimony, his parents had left him alone in their caravan for half an hour, coloring, while John helped the Santistas with a balky horse and Mary was out picking up groceries. In that time, 'Dickie' had vanished.

Police reported signs of a struggle.

Grayson didn't remember struggling. He only remembered—

"_Who are you?"_

"_Your fate."_

—the white Court masks, round white barn-owls with round dark eyes, and something thick with the smell he now knew had been chloroform, and the determination to _get-away_, springing tension in his legs as he leapt back, leapt aside, jumped—twisted—kicked off the side of the top bunk—landed by the door long enough to turn the handle but that meant staying still long enough that one of the masked men seized him by the arm, _shook _him—the heavy sickly-sweet smell in his mouth—

Grayson came to himself to realize he had been hyperventilating in a public library, with a news story containing his full name on the projector in front of him. As if he'd never had the slightest training in subtlety. Luckily the 'A/V Room' was screened apart from the rest of the library, so no one seemed to have seen.

He'd forgotten how hard he'd tried to escape, when they first came for him. Forgotten…

Hadn't quite forgotten that he'd wept, at first. Or how he'd told the Court that _Daj o Dad _would come rescue him. No matter what.

Had never forgotten when they'd laughed at him, and told him he'd been sold like a trick pony. No one was coming.

No one was ever going to save him again.

* * *

"_Cold?"_ _Mary repeated. Like there was any chance she'd misheard._

"_That's right." The sergeant looked bored. _Defensively _bored, like someone manning a complaint counter who didn't give a fuck whether the customers were satisfied as long as they went away._

_So even though she wanted to fly into a rage and lean across the counter and demand to know what kind of department they were running here, she shouldn't. "You're declaring Dick's case cold. He hasn't even been missing for a month!" Okay, so her voice had started to rise a little toward the end._

_The sergeant blinked, once. It seemed vaguely reptilian. "And we haven't got any new information in over two weeks. Sorry, ma'am. We've got other cases that need the manpower."_

_If the 'sorry' had only been sincere. Just that, and she might have forgiven him. Him, not the department, because sure, let the detective assigned to it shuffle Dick's case to the bottom of his stack while he tried to help other people; she might not like it but she knew her family were hardly the only victims in Gotham. If they had run out of ideas, of leads to follow, then yes, she understood that their time had to be dedicated to other things._

_But declaring it cold? That they weren't going to look for him anymore, not even a little?_

Giving up_ on him?_

_Mary leaned forward. Not enough to be threatening. Not enough to get her out of her seat, even, but enough that she was holding the man's eyes from across only eighteen inches of air. "My son is still missing."_

"_You know most kidnapping cases are solved in the first forty-eight hours if they're solved at all," he reminded her with only the barest hint of interest. _

_Mary breathed. She wished John were here. He had much less of a temper than she did; either he'd be helping her keep her cool or he'd snap, and if this was enough to push _John_ over the edge she could scream herself blue and feel justified. "That doesn't mean," she said coldly, "that Dickie is dead."_

_The sergeant sighed. "Look. I hope you find your kid. Really. I do. But the department's shelving the case for now, and that's just how it is. It's already done."_

_Mary tried to smile unpleasantly as she stood up; overshot, and produced a sort of threatening grimace. Her face felt stiff, but that was no excuse for missing her mark. She went with it, though. She was a performer. Trapeze and life were the same. You made whatever was in the show part of it, somehow, and kept going, because you didn't get to stop in the middle to try again. "Nothing's done, sergeant." She picked up the leather carrybag that had seen her across three continents, even that time when she'd had to get from Belgrade to Zagreb on foot and left all her other luggage behind, and left without looking at him again. She certainly wasn't going to _thank_ him for this._

* * *

He forced himself to finish reading the story, with the Graysons' tearful pleas for any possible information and the protestations of helpless ignorance from every member of the circus who should have had line of sight to the raided caravan.

Then, because coming twice in two days to view Gotham Herald microfiche would be too likely to imprint him on the librarians' memories, he made himself follow the story, on and on through the weeks as the updates became smaller and drier, and finally vanished altogether. And then he searched on another half-hour longer, just in case, because he had discipline.

Then he put everything away, walked out of the library and several blocks further, before turning out of sight down a blind alley, climbing a wall, and reclaiming his hidden rooftop surveillance point, where he had left the duffle bag containing most of his possessions.

If this had been a mission, the way things used to be, he would not even have noticed the briskness of the autumn wind off Lake Michigan. But this was his current campsite, with his back against the concrete foot of a water tank, and he dug his blanket out of his bag and wrapped it around his shoulders before letting himself think.

Something was off.

Selling children was not permitted by law, so of course it would play as a kidnapping. And of course the search would come to nothing; even when he had been a new-forged Talon, the Owls had already had enough influence to bury any line of investigation that led to them, so long as it was a relatively subtle transgression. Especially if no one really cared.

Six weeks of news coverage was too long. Of course, the Graysons might not have known there was no need to pretend so hard…but where were they _now?_

He needed more information.

* * *

"_John, look at this."_

_Mary's notebook was thick with notes, heavy block print in felt-tip pen pressing close against every margin, notes of periodical and issue and page number crowded against the names of people she'd phoned, with their useful comments in quotations. But the conclusion she was sharing across the cluttered library table was marked out clean and clear, marching down the middle of the page, each entry on its own solemn line._

_Alton Carver, acrobat, Haley's Circus, 1962._

_Mary Turner, Hapshaw's Freak Show, 1948._

_Wei Qi, contortionist, Barnum &amp; Bailey's, 1911._

_Patrick McGillicudy, high wire, 1873?_

_William Cobb, Haley's Circus, 1841._

_Alexander Staunton, acrobat, 1831?_

_René Joaquin, trick shooter, 1829? _

_Fabio Spelterini, high wire, 1811._

_Aleksander ?, tumbler, 1805?_

_Sukey Badi, acrobat, unspecified Roma caravan, 1777._

_Anette Feingilt, dancer, 1760._

_Unnamed tumbler, 1734._

_Benjamin Ayres, 1710?_

_Unnamed Rom boy, 1693._

"_They're the same," she whispered—less out of library etiquette than from the growing understanding that this was bigger than they'd realized, that anyone could be listening. "Children, between the ages of four and ten. Performers, skilled ones, especially the agile. Taken, blatantly, so that it's obvious they can't just have wandered off, like someone _wants _people to know they're taking them. Every twenty years or so going back as far as I can…"_

_Her husband's face was set and grey, struggling between horror at the implications, fury at the kidnappers, and anger at her for chasing shadows when their actual flesh-and-blood boy was lost somewhere in this awful city._

"_Mary…" he whispered, and then slowly his hand reached out and brushed across the back of hers, where she was still holding the notebook up for him to see. Tore his eyes from the list of names (and the hidden, unwritten name at the top, throbbing and glowing in its inklessness, _**Richard Grayson**,_ and how had nobody known, how had nobody warned them not to bring their beautiful boy here to perform for whatever eyes had caught on him, how had _Jack _not known, when Dick was the third child his family circus had lost here in a hundred and forty years?) to hers, his soft heather meeting her deep indigo in perfect sympathy. "We have to…"_

"_Do you think there's anyone who would listen?" she asked, ever so softly, hoping he would say yes, and name a name._

_He sighed, and dragged a hand across his rumpled hair. "There's got to be some reporter in this city hungry enough for a story, if nothing else," he said, but they both knew that was a last resort. If They didn't know they were onto Them yet, they didn't want to tip Them off._

_Besides, it wasn't as though the papers weren't aware of these kidnappings. They'd been one of her main sources, all the way back. She might not have dug deep enough to realize the size of this, if it weren't for the fact that she couldn't seem to get another story about Dick published without a new angle, which was almost as infuriating as the way the police had declared Dick's case _cold _on the twenty-fourth day, even if the slacking attention from the press wasn't actually a failure of their duty, the way the police indifference was. _

_The extra color of his being an acclaimed professional acrobat had sparked initial interest, but his parents were circus, rootless and thus irresponsible, and that seemed to suck much of the pathos out of his disappearance, somehow. _

_The only article covering the Badi case had contained tasteless jokes about the remarkable reversal of someone stealing children from gypsies. Sometimes it seemed like two hundred years had hardly changed anything. _

_It was too late for the others, but her Robin was still alive—must be, _had _to be—and she…and they would find him._

* * *

In the end, Grayson had to hire a private investigator. It took a rather more dedicated approach to theft than the lackadaisical mode he'd been using to pay for bus tickets and keep himself fed and clothed and groomed enough to avoid drawing negative attention, but he acquired the two thousand dollars necessary to get one Nolan Burton, Philadelphia P.I., to take a train up into Gotham and query police files and public records on his behalf. (_Be careful_, he'd told the man, because while it would hardly keep him awake at night to send an employee to a death he earned by carelessness, he couldn't afford for Burton to be questioned by the Owls. _Don't get noticed poking around._)

Burton had raised his eyebrows and looked Grayson up and down again. He had begun to regret not wearing a mask of some kind to the meeting; it would have made it obvious he had something to hide, but at least there would have been less chance of matching him to his wanted poster. He wasn't paying _nearly_ enough to buy silence. The PI could hardly have complained about the melodrama of the disguise; the man wore a long coat with a fedora, and black leather gloves, as though he'd stepped out of a period movie.

Grayson didn't particularly care if the man lacked practicality, unless it got him taken up for questioning, but the outfit annoyed him anyway, because it reminded him of Harvey Dent, who had always been irritating and had once (while wearing the stupid hat) put a rusty length of rebar clear through Talon's shoulder. It had taken three days for all the rust fragments to work their way out. Owlman had taken notes.

"Yeah, okay, kid," Burton said. Scooped his hat up by the crown, pressed it onto his head, and left to catch his train.

Then Grayson got to wait (outside Philadelphia itself, of course, and never anywhere Burton might direct any pursuit) to see if he came back with the required information, nothing useful, Court agents, or not at all.

Two days into waiting, the anonymous e-mail account he had created just to give Burton some way to contact him received a message, and he scheduled a rendezvous in two hours.

He was there an hour early, and lay in wait in the steady autumnal drizzle to watch Burton arrive a quarter of an hour before the specified time and stand beside the small memorial to an unimportant war. His body language was closed, even more than usual; if it said anything it was only 'I am standing in the rain but at least I have a hat and coat.' He didn't seem tense.

At three in the afternoon, Grayson showed himself on the sidewalk across the street, waited until Burton noticed him, nodded, and slipped into the small diner next door to the building who roof he'd been using for surveillance. He claimed a window booth—he was far less concerned about the possibility of snipers than he was about giving up his own sightlines—and asked the waitress for coffee, having learned from experience that even if one did not care about standing out as unusual, such establishments tended to strongly discourage occupancy of their premises by non-patrons.

By the time the coffee arrived, Burton had appeared in the doorway. Grayson met his eyes across the room, which should be acknowledgment enough for any reasonable person.

Burton slid into the booth, taking his hat off with one hand, with the other setting down a sealed white-plastic bag that flexed like a stack of unbound paper. He would have been so astoundingly easy to kill, in that moment, half sitting down, with his line of sight partially blocked and both hands occupied. Of course, most people were so easy to kill all the time that it really made no difference. But with Burton, Grayson was sincerely unsure whether such moments were normal stupidity or calculated shows of non-hostile intent, and that made them unsettling.

His…contractor pushed the package across the table, and Grayson laid his hand on it with a nod. Laid a small manila envelope with the second half of the fee down in response. Burton reached out and dragged it closer, but neither opened it to count the bills or stowed it away. He wished to talk. It _might_ be important. Grayson waited.

"So," Burton said. "Answer one question for me."

Grayson sat very still.

"Just for me," the man reiterated. "Curiosity. Hazard of the trade."

Grayson continued to wait. If Burton was so determined to ask his question, he would.

"Taking that as a yes," he said easily, drumming his fingers contemplatively on the tabletop beside his hat, raindrops beading perfectly round on the dense grey felt until one by one they sunk abruptly away. He seemed to be looking at the stack of strawberry jam packets, but Grayson's face was most assuredly in his line of sight, and he had no doubt that he had the bulk of the PI's attention. "You wouldn't happen to be named Richard Grayson, would you?"

He'd given the name Roger Merriman, since going conspicuously nameless was exactly as subtle as walking around in a mask—and only slightly worse than a trench coat and fedora. Burton had declined to call him by it, which he had suspected all along meant the man knew it was a pseudonym.

Once again, he said nothing, and if it could be told externally that this was a tenser, more cornered _nothing_, it was entirely accidental.

"You can't have expected it not to occur to me," said Burton. Nodded toward the packet. "Most of what I found with those names involved them harassing the police about their missing kid."

He shrugged one shoulder slightly, still apparently absorbed in the stack of jam. "Not that they got charged for harassment, or anything, but you read between the lines and they were riding the detectives pretty hard. Which, you know, that's pretty much normal, especially considering their job left town without them, so they didn't have much to keep them busy. The kidnapping case got shelved about three weeks in—it's all in there," he flicked his fingers toward the package of papers, and for the first time brought his eyes around to meet Grayson's. The drumming fingers slowed to a stop. "Listen, kid," he said. "I'm really sorry."

Grayson was not particularly practiced at discerning one non-hostile emotion from another, but he could find no falseness in the look of sympathy. Felt himself bristle inside. "I'm alive," he stated. Burton knew nothing about him, or his life. He needed no one's pity.

Burton drew a breath through his nose and flattened his hand against the table, and then seemed to think better of whatever he had been going to say. "Yeah," he acknowledged. "Piece of advice? Don't say your cover ID like you just read it out of a briefing packet, if you want people to believe you. Everybody's got _some_ kind of relationship with their name, love it or hate it or what."

Grayson blinked. It was good advice, if he could manage to follow it. He doubted most people he spoke to were as observant as this, but giving obvious pseudonyms was only slightly less memorable than refusing to share a name at all. "Richard Grayson," he said aloud, to listen for any differences in his own voice.

Burton's lips twitched in a slight smile, and his eyes brightened in a way Grayson was trying to learn. "_That's_ the idea. Maybe a little less like the world's about to end, if you're trying for blending in, but that's a lot better."

Discomfited, and glad he generally expressed no inadvertent emotion, Grayson lifted his mug for the first time since the waitress had brought it, and took a sip of the no-longer-hot coffee. Speaking of blending. The waitress had rather conspicuously not come to offer to sell Burton anything. Presumably their exchange of envelopes was so obviously some kind of shady business that she wanted to stay out of the way.

Put the mug down again, unimpressed by the bitter taste, and reached out to break the seal on Burton's package.

He had no intention of perusing the information publicly—he had, after all, hyperventilated in a library in Chicago over _newspapers_—but in the unlikely event Burton was blatantly attempting to cheat him, he would prefer to find out now, so that he could kill him and take the money back without having to track him down again, possibly after he'd visited his bank. Grayson hated wasted effort.

"About your parents," his contractor forestalled him, with that tone like pity audible again. Grayson spared him a second's calculated glare. Burton did not back down.

"I'm sorry," he said again. "They found them together. He matched your description. She wasn't exactly recognizable, but she had ID for Mary Grayson."

Grayson's eyes fell to the papers in his hands. Clipped together, at the top of the stack: two death certificates—and a police report.

* * *

"_I'll just toss my wallet over, nice and easy…" John suited word to deed, his perfect sense of trajectory landing the billfold precisely at the gunman's toes. Mary's pounding heart turned over when she noticed the way the man's eyes didn't flicker to it even for a second. She'd worked as a street performer, when she was younger. Ignoring the money itself, except for the occasional correctly-timed thanks, was an important skill, and you had to learn to do it even when you hadn't eaten all day and your dinner was riding on today's take._

_Not taking his eyes off the marks had to mean the same kind of professionalism in a mugger._

_That was good, really. Professionals kept a cool head. He wouldn't pull the trigger in a panic. They couldn't really afford being mugged, but getting through it without getting hurt was the priority._

"_Good," he said. "Handbag," he ordered Mary. She bit her tongue and unslung the strap from her shoulder. If he just grabbed it and left she'd get to keep her cards and ID as well as her money, since she kept her wallet in an inside pocket of her coat in case of purse-snatchers, but she'd _rather_ lose all of those than the contents of her bag, which included all her research on Them._

_She hadn't actually intended to try to MACE a man with a gun, but she didn't like giving up her only self-defense weapon, either._

"_There's nothing valuable in there," she told the man, as she set it on the ground and took a step back._

_He didn't have much in the way of distinguishing characteristics, though Mary had memorized his face, for what good it would do her, with the police in this town. He shrugged, disinterested in her editorial commentary on the contents of her purse._

_She took another step back, and John stepped with her. They'd been forced five meters deep into the alley at gunpoint, too far to bolt, but the gunman hadn't bothered getting between them and the exit. Almost like he _wanted_ them to try running—and as Mary thought that he said, "Stop," and raised the gun an inch, and she saw her death in him. In the way he was holding his gun, calm threat but also the _certainty_ of shooting. The way he was looking at them._

_This wasn't about the money._

_He was standing comfortably, utterly without nerves, taking his time lining up his shot because there was nothing they could do, no way to resist him, no way to escape, because long before they could be close enough to touch him or far enough to evade him, he could have shot them dead. _

_And he was _enjoying_ that._

_They shared a flicker of a glance, just enough to confirm that they both knew, and then John moved forward. Not sharp enough, or close enough, to startle—just enough to put him closer than Mary. He raised his chin, just a little, and looked the gunman in the eye. Go ahead, then, kill me if you're going to, he was saying. Me. Not her._

_It was gallant and probably pointless, and if it worked she would never forgive him for as long as she lived, but she understood. It was all he could think of to do._

_No one was going to run toward the sound of shots fired. They were on their own._

_She took a few small, nervous steps to the right, distancing herself from where her husband was daring the mugger to kill him. The man had raised his eyebrows, and there was a pull to his mouth, half smirk and half sneer. "If you're in such a hurry," he said, and pulled the trigger. _

_John dodged the bullet. _

_Mary felt like she had all the time in the world to notice that, the way he'd used his lifetime's understanding of how to already be moving in time to be where safety was _going_ to be; the way the mugger's eyes widened and he reoriented onto the acrobat's new position, further left but not quite trapped against the alley wall, with something like fear; the way John was tensing to jump _up_, like he hoped getting onto the fire escape would help; the way the mugger was ignoring her and she was almost close enough to tackle him around the neck now and if she could just get hold of the gun the two of them could probably overpower him and—_

_Deeper in the shadows of the alleyway, a second gunshot sounded._

_Mary watched the eruption of blood from John's back. The pained surprise in his eyes as he fell. Endless milliseconds dragged over her raw nerves as the shot still rang and buzzed through her bones and teeth._

_The original mugger was roughly between her and the hidden gunman, and she flung herself across the last meter to slam against his back, got an arm around his neck, and squeezed with everything she had._

_Mary Grayson had done daily handstand pushups since she was sixteen. She professionally lifted more than her own body weight at high speeds. Everything she had added up to a lot._

_His free hand came up to scrabble against her at once, but she had the advantage in leverage, and hung on as he battered at her elbow with the gun-barrel, then dropped the weapon outright to free his other hand. When he bent forward, lifting her feet off the ground, she clamped her thighs around his sides and squeezed tighter._

_The shooter had come forward out of the shadows, passed John's body without the slightest acknowledgement, and was standing several feet back, trying out angles to shoot her dead without hitting his partner. Mary only noticed him when he said something, amused and mocking, something about a little lady that she had no time to decipher through the blood rushing in her ears._

_The enemy in her grasp growled._

_If she had had a knife, she probably would have stuck it into his neck—less out of an animal desperation to survive than out of sheer outrage, that her already-wounded family should have been torn apart like this, for the amusement or convenience of these men. At least she had hurt this one, frightened him; disrupted that casual predatory confidence that they had the power to do such thing without ever paying a drop of blood. They deserved to die for this, but all she had was her bare hands, and her weak human fingernails. And her teeth, and she had sunk them into the top of the gunman's shoulder before the thought really occurred to her, holding on with everything she had and making him give a strangled shout through her grip and tear just a little more desperately. She could feel his strength failing even before his knees buckled._

_That was enough to make his friend stop laughing at him, unfortunately, and put away his gun and come closer to help pry her arms loose. She clung with the strength of desperation, but there were two of them, and once the shooter dug into the tendons of her right wrist and dislocated her pinkie finger in the course of making her let go of her opposite elbow, leaving her with only the strength of one arm to pit against him, it was only a matter of time._

_By the time they tore her free, slammed her into the alley floor hard enough to rattle her brains and knock out her breath, the first man was on the brink of unconsciousness, and that bought her seconds as he dragged deep lungsful of air, crouched on hands and knees. Seconds to catch sight of a single dim star through the light-polluted smog, to feel to cold dirty pavement at her back, to try to get herself upright again or at least sitting, to think she should try to get a glimpse of John and decide that no, it was bad enough for her last memory of him to be the light going out of his eyes, without looking at him dead. To take in a thousand details of the worn bricks in the far wall, as though she had studied them for hours rather than instants, and the features of the man who had killed her husband, taller and darker than the one she'd strangled, and the way she could see from this angle that each of them had a black feather tattooed on the left side of his neck._

_And by the time she had managed to draw a single shallow breath and get her elbows under her and sit up, the first man had swiped his gun up and staggered to his feet, swaying, gasping, red with choking and fury, and brought the barrel level with her eyes._

_**Little bird,**__she thought, to the little boy somewhere in the world counting on her to save him. __**I'm sorr—**_

* * *

Mugging gone wrong, the report said. Common occurrence in Gotham; stupid out-of-towners went down the wrong alley, no one left to miss them, case closed.

The officer in charge did note the blood type (B-) of the foreign traces found on the woman's mouth, and his recommendation that samples be kept for possible DNA analysis, since the ballistics on the bullet that had killed her were a possible match for a gun since seized during that same officer's arrest of one Luc Gaspiardo, blood type B-, who had had a peculiar deep bite mark on the back of his shoulder at the time.

This recommendation had not been followed, or the implication pursued in any way. Gaspiardo had not been charged with anything, although he had not gotten his unregistered weapon back.

Grayson stared at the papers, alone in his attic squat. He _knew_ Gaspiardo, or had. The man had been killed in a raid on a rival organization's heroin distribution headquarters when Talon was fourteen; one of the Owlman's oldest loyal followers, and one of his captains. The man had always resented Talon's assumption of responsibility for the majority of important and sensitive killings once his training was complete, and his own relegation to what he perceived as lower-status tasks. Had in fact been assigned to lead the raid that had killed him in part because his discontent had seemed ripe to blossom into some form of treachery.

Gaspiardo would already have considered a casual mugging beneath him when Grayson was _born_, never mind six years later.

It wasn't unheard-of for Wayne to kill people he'd already bought off, especially if they made themselves annoying or represented a loose end, but.

But.

So many details not quite aligning.

He wondered how inappropriate normal people would consider it, to hold in your hands documents detailing your parents' murders, and feel this…

Hopeful. Relieved.

_Glad._

Because death certificates or not, this wasn't losing them. If anything, this might be getting them _back._

* * *

_**A/N: **__I didn't originally intend to have a fight scene toward the end there, but the Graysons are very different people with very different reflexes from the Waynes, and this is what they decided they wanted to do. Mary got steadily angrier as she went, which I don't know why I didn't expect. Nolan Burton also went and gave himself a speaking role. Characters, man._

_All the Anglo-sounding names on Mary's list except Ayres are canon Talons, by the way; Wei Qi is the name I gave the unnamed Asian female one. Sorry to anyone who actually _liked_ the idea of Dick's parents selling him; this universe is not that kind of backwards, and these are essentially the same deeply affectionate people who shaped Nightwing's basic personality before he ever met Batman. The Court _has_ bought kids in the past, since some parents just suck, and it helps a lot in the early stages of conditioning to assert that the Talon is _owned_, and furthermore has nowhere to go home to. So they always tell them they were sold.  
_


	38. Always the Merry

'Always the Merry'

**_A/N:_**_ Sorry folks, this weekend was frenetic. Thanks very much for being around for the fic's birthday! Have a holiday chapter in recompense! (Note that opinions expressed by characters are not necessarily those of the author.)_

* * *

Major party holidays were heavy work days for the street-level vigilante.

In Gotham, March seventeenth qualified.

"Now, Johnny, we've talked about this," Jokester sighed, keeping one foot on the mugger's forearm as he shattered the end of the confiscated wooden bat against the alley wall. "You can't just go around jumping vulnerable fellow citizens in dark alleys, no matter how easy they make it."

"Fuck you," Johnny Maltos gasped, going for what had to be a concealed knife, and Jokester shook his head in disappointment and shifted the angle of his heel enough to cause a stabbing pain.

"Listen," he said, when the startled shout faded. "You're not alone in the world, yet. Yer sister's still willing to put you up, and even a job with the Penguin is better than this—he's got a dental plan now, didja know?" Jokester gave a little chuckle, at Cobblepot's stubborn blurring of the line between benevolent crime lord and honest businessman, and then sobered, smiling crookedly at his captive. Who was twenty, with short blondish-brown hair, still showing a scattering of pimples near his hairline.

"I get that you're mad," he added, easing up with his foot and casting the broken bat aside, "the system's broken, yeah. But _this lady_ never did anything to you. Just cuz she's dressed nice doesn't make her the bad guy, ya know? Don't we got enemies enough, son?"

For a second, Johnny bit his lip, his eyebrows twisting with an uncertain, internal kind of pain instead of the physical one. Then anger lashed over his face, instead, bare-toothed and narrow-eyed, and he grabbed under his shirt with his free arm, got the knife out, and went for the nearest ankle.

Jokester jumped out of the way of that, swept Johnny's arm out as he tried to roll to his feet, and hit a pressure point in his neck that made the kid collapse into unconsciousness. (He _so_ loved being able to do that. Concussions could _kill_ people.)

"Whew," he said, wiping at his forehead to acknowledge and dismiss the sudden burst and release of tension, and looked up at the fifty-something lady in the fur-trimmed coat who'd been backed up against the dead-end of the alley, obediently unhooking her earrings in terror, when he arrived, and smiled. She still looked petrified. "It's okay."

This reassurance seemed to have little effect.

"On your way then, ma'am," Jokester said politely, with a little bow that made his leaf-green coattails sway, offering her a hand over the unconscious form blocking her passage.

She clutched her purse to her chest and huddled in place until he sighed and cleared out of her path, into the recess of the side door in the left-hand building, so she could scurry over Johnny's feet and back to the sidewalk while giving him a wide berth. He sighed, and didn't bother to call anything after her.

"Tourists," said a disgusted voice from the blackness on top of the closed dumpster.

J regained his grin and turned his bright little flashlight on the place, illuminating a confidently slouching figure against the brick, brown leather coat and red fiberglass mask and a well-battered pair of boots.

"A local wouldn't've gotten grabbed that easy," the young Red Hood stated, shrugging away from his wall and strolling to the near edge, hands shoving deep into his pockets. He could pass for a smallish grown man now, in that getup, though he still had several growing years ahead of him. It was looking like he was going to end up _big. _"And sure as shit wouldn't've been afraid of _you._"

"She could be suburban," Jokester argued brightly, tucking away that last remark as the comfort it was meant to be—though really, if he got sad every time someone reacted badly to his face, he'd turn into one of those droopy clowns with the little black tear. "She was dolled up nice, maybe came down from Bristol."

The boy behind the helmet snorted. "Just as bad. I had a pair of morons earlier think Red Hood was some kind of gang. Didn't even try to get their wallets back. Kept them alive, that's more than they should expect, getting drunk in a bad neighborhood they don't know, looking that flashy."

"Aw, nobody deserves to get killed just for being stupid, Jay lad."

Jason snorted again, but nodded, conceding the point, and hopped down from his perch, landing just the far side of Johnny. "Pisses me off, though."

Jokester shrugged, and chuckled, and bent down to grab Johnny under one arm, to drag him over into the hidden corner between the dumpster and the end of the alley, where his unconsciousness wouldn't make him such an obvious target. Jason, without discussion, helped. He did kick the unconscious young man in the bottom of the foot once they'd moved him, though, presumably to take out a little of his worse-than-usual mood.

"So what's eating you, Junior?" Jokester inquired as they strolled out of the alleyway together, casual as could be.

Jason's face was hidden, but he still managed to look like he was considering whether to answer. Which was his right, hey. They detoured around an unwise partier puking up his guts and got a block away on Beacon street with Jason still thinking about whether he wanted to discuss his _feelings_. Finally, he shrugged. "I hate Saint Patrick's Day."

Jokester pulled sad eyes. He liked it. Everybody wore green, which was obviously an ideal fashion decision, and there were all those fundraiser all-you-can-eat dinners.

Jason did that thing where he emoted rolling his eyes so well you could tell even through the mask, and snorted again. "Don't give me that, you like _every_ holiday. This one is basically just full of dumbasses. Pretending they're celebrating the Irish by getting falling-down drunk on Guinness and putting ugly leprechauns on things."

This grumbling seemed to have a slightly more proprietary tone than you'd expect, and J cocked his head. "You Irish, Jaybird?"

Jason shrugged. "My mom was. Well, not _Irish_ Irish, but Gotham Irish. I was a Crime Alley kid, but she grew up over in the Cauldron. Catherine Keaney, was her original name."

Talking about his mother seemed to get easier the longer he went without being Talon, but it still cost him, and that he'd bothered to say it showed it meant something to him. Jokester came to a decision, and turned them right at the next intersection. "What say we call it a night, then. You want to hit a proper Irish joint that won't be up to its ears in tourists? I've got some friends down the Cauldron."

"Of course you have friends down the Cauldron," Jason muttered.

"Billy's having a bit of a concert in his pub, strictly no tourists."

"We went to the _moon_ I bet you'd say, 'Oh, I've got a friend just over here,' and lead us up the side of Mare Tranquilis to this one particular _crater_."

J snickered. "So you up for it?"

Jason reached up and unlocked his helmet, shaking his hair back as he pulled it aside and let sharp March-midnight air strike his face. "_Anything_ so long as I don't have to lay eyes on one more glittery green shamrock hat."

* * *

"_All o' the hard days are gone…._"

It was late, of course, and Billy and his band had gotten through the raucous hilarity and stirring nationalist ballads and into some gentler numbers when Jokester and Jason slipped up along the back wall, where the middle-aged lady tending bar glanced over and smiled.

J winked back at Mary Kate. She arched an eyebrow at Jason, who without his helmet was quite visibly sixteen, and J shrugged. He wasn't going to _ask_ her to serve a minor alcohol, but if she felt like it, a little beer wasn't going to do significant harm to a kid who'd been compelled to spill people's guts for them, _with a knife,_ if they resisted interrogation. And Jason definitely wasn't going to get drunk on purpose any time soon. He didn't trust himself enough.

He'd get there.

"_We're all safe and warm here my friends; the hard times are gone, sure they won't come again…"_

Duncan Finney noticed him skulking and threw a nod. J knew for a fact Duncan didn't think much of Saint Patrick, on the not-unreasonable grounds that he'd been an Englishman, or at least Britannian, and 'what has the Church ever done for Ireland, eh?' (Duncan was an authority on every British incursion into Irish liberty since 1155 AD. They were friends in part because J was willing to listen to him expound on them.) He waved back. Duncan's table was full, but maybe he'd steer Jason around for introductions later if he got into a friendly mood.

_"So raise up your glasses and sing, the hard times are gone, sure they don't mean a thing…"_

"Water's good," Jason told Mary Kate when they'd slithered near enough the bar for him to talk practically into her ear. She gave him a pint of lemonade, and she and J both laughed at Jason's I-want-to-be-annoyed-but-this-is-exactly-what-I-wanted-anyway face. J got a half—of Guinness, he was pretty sure, because they'd be out of everything else this dark by now, but he wasn't really a beer expert—and he and Jason claimed patches of wall, to sip and take in the show.

"…_laugh at the darkness and dance until dawn, all o' the hard days are gone._"

J elbowed Jason lightly, and gestured toward the little stage, where Billy and his two bandmates were playing their hearts out, fiddle and flute. Jason rolled his eyes all _I'm humoring you,_ but he joined in the final chorus with the rest of the pub, and was definitely smiling, "_All of th' hard days are gooooone!"_

You'd never get _anywhere_, Jokester firmly believed, without a bit of positive attitude.

* * *

_"**For the good are always the merry, **save by an evil chance, and the merry love the fiddle, and the merry love to dance."–W.B. Yeats, 'Fiddler of Dooney'  
_

* * *

_**A/N: ^^ **__The song in the last scene is not a traditional one, but a modern Celtic-folk composition popular with the Northeast Irish-American crowd, which I happen to find warm and fuzzy. 1155 was the Norman Invasion of Ireland, which went less well than their 1066 invasion of England, but did result in replacing the Gaelic Church with the Catholic one. Saint Patrick was a fifth-century Roman Briton; we don't know his actual name. Duncan is based on real people. _

_Gotham's history and geography generally read like a mashup of New York and Boston, both of which are major Irish-American enclaves, and the Cauldron is a canon neighborhood, appearing in Batman mostly in the context of the Irish mob. 9_9 DC Comics. Jason is of course not actually related to Catherine, but he doesn't know that. (She never had a background before Nu52, and I don't like that one, so behold my headcanon.^^)_


	39. Called to Carpet

'Called to Carpet'

**_A/N: _**_ALEX AND HIS DESK RETURN. Luthor presides over the country and desks preside over Luthor. Secret rulers of the universe: desks. This chapter is set about three hours after 'The Owl and the Dead Boy,' which incidentally was set at three AM in Colorado, so it's now first thing in the morning in Washington DC._

_Btw I hear Nu52 Amanda Waller is young and attractive. NO._

* * *

The snarl of fury from behind the door of the Oval Office made one of the six Secret Servicemen on guard jump. The others glanced at him in lofty scorn. It was the President's voice, not an intruder; none of them had heard him sound like that in person, but there had been a few televised showdowns with the Kryptonian. If he'd been alone they'd still have been obligated to check on him, but his cyborg bodyguard was around somewhere, so presidential snarling wasn't an alarm signal on its own. Even on a day like today.

"Sounds like I'm right on time for my appointment," said an immeasurably dry voice, as the head of the NSA approached along the carpeted hall. She was neither tall nor thin, nor was she young, and her hair was buzzed as short as any soldier's, but she wore pearls at her earlobes and throat without any sense of incongruity, and her eyes were the steel of those who feel they have nothing left to prove.

"Doctor Waller," the head of the detail acknowledged, as his subordinates whipped out a trio of scanners to confirm her identity. She absently keyed her passcode in when a keypad was presented, her attention on the door.

"Keep practicing," she told the operative with the genescanner, who was still working thirty seconds after the others were done. Then she opened the office door and went in.

Luthor's eyes landed on her immediately, and he erupted from his chair, hand slammed down on top of a very recognizable report, with photographs of the shattered outer wall government facility clipped to the front, debris scattered where it had fallen under a mighty blow from within. "Why did I not know about this?" he demanded.

Waller raised her eyebrows. "You got that report no later than I did," she said blandly. About fifteen minutes later, actually, and that mostly because he'd been asleep when the Crucible cracked open, while she had been working overnight.

The sound that rose in Luthor's throat was neither laugh nor snarl, but seemed akin to both. "Are you honestly still trying to stonewall me, this late in the game?" He slapped down a photograph on top of the report, one that definitely had _not_ been included in it: a dark-haired teenage boy, unconscious in some kind of upright sealed pod.

With no surprise, Waller noted that she wasn't likely to be offered a chair. Normally Luthor attempted to affect an egalitarian atmosphere almost to the point of absurdity, but now he watched her from behind his desk with the clear intent of calling her to the carpet, as the saying went.

"Ah," she said blandly. "Technically, you weren't cleared for that file."

"Cleared," Luthor scoffed. He didn't add 'I'm the President!', but he did glare at her. "I had the surviving security clips from the breakout, and the initial report referenced Project Codename: Jigsaw. I got to the bottom of it."

Maybe it did say something negative about the flow of information through the national government, that the POTUS had just been reduced to hacking federal databases to get to the bottom of a crisis, but Waller preferred to think of it as good resource management. He hadn't needed to know. Now that it was relevant, she would have told him, if one of her subordinates hadn't already carelessly left him a trail of breadcrumbs. As much as was necessary, at least.

"So," said Luthor, leaning over the desk slightly—not enough to look as though he was trying to loom over her from eight feet away, which would have been ridiculous, but enough to underscore the intent way he was studying her expression, as though he expected her to give anything away. She stood, patient as stone. He drummed his fingers on the report. "Do you have anything to say?"

"I think I'll wait until you've said your piece."

Luthor snorted at the cageyness of it, but let her decision stand. "Alright. Leaving aside the ethics questions—and believe me, we'll get to the ten kinds of illegal and unethical at some point—you thought it was a good idea to keep Owlman and this…Ultraboy in the same secure facility while we got Wayne's long-term cell prepared for after his trial. _I_ didn't know there was an Ultraboy to worry about. The Supreme Court didn't know. But you knew, and judging by the way he went _down_ instead of _up _when he got out of his cell, so did Bruce Wayne."

"My people hardly have time to do any real work, they're so busy working out which of their colleagues are moles," Waller reminded her commander dryly. "It should have occurred to me he might know about the project."

Luthor's mouth thinned at the unapologetic way she admitted fault for that single, limited error. "The project," he repeated. "Yes. Let's talk about the project. I was under the impression that after the clone now known as Bob destroyed his facility from within, Professor Hamilton's Project KR was shut down."

"It was. And his notes were seized, and utilized in Project Cadmus."

Air hissed through Luthor's teeth. He was above throttling people for being psychopaths. He _was._ "Soldiers grown from dragon's teeth," he said, with deliberate calm. "It took me a while to place the reference, you know. I wasn't a classics major. Was that your touch?"

"I wasn't a classics major either, Mr. President." It wasn't a no.

"Supersoldiers," Alex said flatly. "Grown in vats. Brainwashed to serve the state. How—tell me, Amanda, _how_—did this seem like a good idea to you?"

"Well," she said, with a trace of irony, "if the project had been ready for launch at the opening of the Injustice War, America might not have been so easily conquered."

"_Or_, considering that more than half the takeover was from the inside and Owlman, at least, _knew_ about the clones, they might have provided the conspirators with another big stick to beat the rest of us with." The President shook his head, glanced over the front of the file on his desk again, and looked away with a soft noise of disgust, and back at Waller.

"In the _best_ case scenario, America would have had a squadron of superpowered slaves."

He knew his choice of words was inflammatory. He knew perfectly well he was a white man talking to a black woman. If he were in public, he'd have moderated his language for the sake of politics and what have you. But this was his office, and he was going to call a spade a spade. And for the first time today, he saw an emotion slightly stronger than longsuffering patience touch Waller's expression.

"And how likely, in all honesty, was a best-case scenario to emerge, in a situation involving sentient weapons?" Luthor threw up his hands and dropped back into the sinfully comfortable swivel chair behind the veritable battleship that had been installed as a presidential work surface while the Resolute Desk was undergoing restoration. It had the Presidential Seal stamped on the front, but it was the official version, in which the eagle's head was turned toward the olive branch held in its talon to the left of the image, rather than the sheaf of arrows on the right. (Alex had always wondered whether FDR had been sending an intentional message, by placing that variation front and center. _He_ certainly was. The world had had enough of war.)

"Ultraman could have destroyed our entire planet almost any time he took it into his head, while he was free. And you set out to _copy _him. I think you have officially one-upped the Manhattan Project in terms of _sheer, bloody-minded failure_ to grasp the potential fallout of what you chose to do with science."

There was a second's more silence than there should have been. The head of the NSA stood in the middle of the office with the same rooted patience she generally used as an offensive weapon, but the pause spoke a world more of uncertainty than she had expected to feel today.

"The Manhattan Project was both necessary and inevitable, Mr. President," said Amanda Waller calmly, after that second. "We just put in the effort to get there first."

Luthor blew out a breath that didn't hiss and rubbed the top of his head with the ball of his hand. "Given any new thing, humanity will work out how to ferment it, or kill with it, or both," he grumbled. An admission. "Once the possibility of leveraging the nature of matter for that kind of explosion was understood, someone was going to make it real." He raised his eyebrows. "And you believe that gene-spliced brainwashed supersoldiers are the inevitable result of current advances in genetics."

Waller quirked an eyebrow. _Obviously_. Luthor snorted. "I swear, you spooks get so tangled up in plots and preemptive counter-plots you lose sight of all common sense." He set his teeth and looked her in the eye. "Informed. _Consent._ Doctor Waller. The unborn cannot give it.

"People created in American cloning projects have human rights," he stated, "_irrespective_ of their genetic profiles. The loophole that makes them minors under the legal guardianship of their creators, who are then empowered to give consent to any medical procedures on their behalf, is being closed, and it _never_ actually made child abuse legal. Merely very difficult to prosecute."

Luthor leaned back in his chair, hands steepled in front of him. "Any future super-soldier programs _will_ restrict themselves to adult recruits. Any intelligent entities developed through _any_ means will not be trained or deployed for military purposes until they have reached the age of eighteen and chosen to enlist of their own free will."

"So by the time they can legally be mobilized, they'll be obsolete," said Waller flatly. "How practical."

Luthor waved an irate hand. "There will probably be equivalency tests to allow them to emancipate younger than eighteen under certain restricted circumstances, but no, Doctor Waller, it _isn't_ practical. It's _right_. Desperate times may call for desperate measures—heaven knows I've done some very shoddy science to keep ahead of El enough times—but constant desperation is no way to live."

The President was an idealist. Not that that was anything she hadn't known.

"Complacency," she responded, "is no way to survive."

Silence reigned for a few seconds, as Luthor studied her, as though he expected her secrets to all be written on her face. Once again, he was the one who broke it.

"The war is over."

"There will always be another war."

"Probably, someday." Luthor sighed, glanced toward the portrait of Washington, and laced his fingers together. "The Cold War drove a lot of scientific progress, got us the funding and focus that put man on the moon, but I've never believed that was worth the cost, even only the cost measured in damage to America. I know you think I have my head in the clouds, Doctor, but I _have _spent most of my adult life fighting a superpowered alien psychopath, and much of the rest of it running a multinational corporation. I know something about paranoia, and the pressure to keep one step ahead.

"But I believe in us—as a species, and as a nation. We don't _need_ to sell our souls to survive."

It was a good speech, and would have played well on television. Waller merely crooked one eyebrow slightly.

Luthor sighed, lightly, affecting profound lack of surprise, and separated his hands so that he could wave one, as though clearing the air.

"So," he said, attention sharpening, "we come to practicalities. You are very clearly the main organizing force behind this conspiracy, and it is clearly prosecutable as treason."

And the thing about prosecuting a government employee for treason, at the moment, was that there had been so many such trials over the last few months, and were so many yet to come, that no one would take much notice.

Waller steamed, internally, and her posture had stiffened.

"I don't _want_ to do that," Luthor stated. "Even if we weren't in a state of emergency, you'd be one of the most effective members of this administration, and with the world's governments all crippled to some degree, I don't think America can do without you right now, without suffering for it. I have worked with far more morally objectionable people in pursuit of a common goal in the past." This was saying very little, since he had even briefly joined forces with the Kryptonian, years ago during the Martian invasion. "So as long as I can count on your cooperation, I want you on our side."

The barely-implicit threat of what he could see done if her cooperation came into question hung in the air, in stark contrast to his glowing golden speech about ethical science and idealistic government. On the other hand, anything less would have been, at this point, outright stupidity.

"Understood," Waller bit out, at last.

Luthor nodded. "I'm putting together an ethical oversight committee. Cadmus and related installations are already being gone over with a fine-toothed comb. A lot of your projects are going to be scrapped, I won't lie to you, but not everything. Adeline Wilson has agreed to come onboard as our new Director of National Intelligence, and she's going to start by heading the investigation. You're suspended from your usual duties, and I recommend that you resign. It will make it much less potentially awkward to engage you in another position.

"But Amanda," Alex leaned forward, expression solemn, one hand on the desktop beside the Crucible break-out report, and Waller had to keep her mouth from twitching dryly as the sunlight streaming in the windows behind him glinted brilliantly off his bald scalp. "If any further human rights abuses—_including_ ones against sapient non-humans—occur on your watch, you _will_ be facing charges. This is your last chance."

Even though he'd just said she was indispensable. "Yes, Mr. President," Waller acknowledged. Trying not to sound too sardonic.

He'd been trying to get Wilson in to interfere with her work since before he'd even been sworn in. It was vaguely galling to have handed him the tools to finally manage it.

"You think that's an empty threat," Luthor remarked. "Don't you."

She said nothing.

"Amanda," he said, almost kindly, "I could send you to prison, if I decided to. Or rather, I could step aside and let the judicial process go to work. But right now we have _dozens_ of metahumans and other remarkable individuals who fought for the Society, serving _our_ society. Some of them genuinely want to make up for what they've done, and others are just looking to soften their sentences, but either way…they're helping to rebuild what's been broken. They're _helping._

"Maybe it _is_ a compromise with the devil that we'll pay for down the road, like some people keep insisting. But I know we need everyone, that we can't afford to waste what we have. So I'm giving you another chance to," his lips curved into a slightly ironic smile, "use your powers for good."

Waller gritted her teeth, but not hard enough to be visible. She was nothing like the Rehabilitative Service Corps. Her loyalty had _never_ wavered. She wanted what was best for this country, and for the citizens as a whole. She would put the well-being of the general population over the rights of a metahuman, or alien, or otherwise-normal costumed lunatic, every time. There was no contest. She would protect the future, no matter what dirty deeds it took in the present.

But that was why he was holding onto her. Keeping her in play, despite this—she admitted it—debacle. Because in a world of treason and subversion and people whose wartime records were ambiguous at best, she could be relied upon not to sell out her country to any power on Earth or from outer space.

And in spite of the error in judgment that had led to Owlman taking control of Project Jigsaw, she was _good_ at her job.

Luthor clapped, dispelling that topic to make way for another.

"_Well_, then. Now that we have the national considerations out of the way, I can take a minute for the personal."

"I expected you to start there," Waller remarked, not quite blandly. She had been standing a long time, but she didn't shift her stance, for comfort or in an effort to change the tone of the interview.

"I know you did," said Luthor, with the extremely loud subtext, _that's one reason why I didn't._ She might consider him naïve, but he wasn't an idiot. "And then you thought maybe I hadn't managed to extract that rather remarkable nugget about the Ultraman cloning project." He propped his chin on his hands and looked at her expectantly.

After a few seconds of silence, Luthor said calmly, "Why me?"

"The Kryptonian DNA was unstable," Waller shrugged. "By the time he made the Bizzarro, Hamilton was more or less throwing anything he could think of into the mix in the attempt to get a live specimen. The result is healthier than it has any right to be, and the records of how Hamilton managed that much was lost when it rampaged."

"He," Alex cut in firmly. "Bob happens to be a friend of mine."

Waller pursed her lips for a split second. "He," she affirmed. "So far as our researchers could establish, without viable Kryptonian ova, or at least infant stem cells, it was impossible to ever produce a pure specimen, because the embryo required something—enzymes, organelles, electromagnetic conditions we had not managed to recreate, maybe some alien cognate of mitochondria—that was not present in the cells taken from the adult male.

"Inserting the nuclear DNA into stripped human stem cells allowed development to progress further, but the organisms were never viable. Most of the project time was spent mapping the genome and determining the sequences that were unable to be correctly expressed under laboratory conditions."

The amount of trial and error that must have required, of spontaneously aborted embryos and, later on, occasional survivors with hideous deformities, went unsaid.

"Replacing them with equivalent human genetic coding was suggested a few years ago. The eventual result…well." Her eyes flicked toward the report on the previously inescapable prison known as the Crucible.

This time the silence lingered longer, with Luthor's expectant eyes locked on Waller's face, but she was never going to break first in a waiting game. She stood like a boulder. "I know all of that, Amanda," he said at last, once he'd made it clear that he'd waited fruitlessly for her to say anything more. "Why _me?_"

She shrugged. "Why not?" Her dark-painted lips quirked to one side. "He _was _intended for deployment against Kal-El of Krypton. You've been the closest thing Earth has had to a standard anti-Kryptonian contingency plan for years."

Luthor scoffed. "For God's sake, it isn't as if you had the fine control to whip up a baby with his brawn and my brains!"

Waller did smile, at that, as much as she ever did. "Call it superstition."

A great sigh, and Luthor sagged over his desk a little. "Superstition. I read the report on Project: Jigsaw, and specifically Specimen 401b; your researchers patched so much getting a healthy boy he's nearly thirty-nine percent mine. Because of _superstition_ and a hideous lack of scientific ethics, I have a super-powered _son_ who is currently on the run with one of the most dangerous men on earth, learning how to be a murderer."

His hand had closed around the small beam-weapon he kept on his desk disguised as a paperweight, but it didn't read, to Amanda, as a gesture of threat, even if he had known that she knew what it was. More like a child reaching for a favorite toy, for comfort. (The irony was that the weapon's primary setting emitted a beam of Kryptonite-like radiation, and the only person left on earth to whom this would give pause was the boy-clone he was so distraught over.

Luthor _had_ survived this long, as he'd pointed out, so he probably had it set to something more useful against humans—'If I shoot you with this repeatedly you'll probably develop some form of cancer in ten years' wasn't, on the whole, nearly as effective a threat as 'this laser can punch a hole through your torso.')

"Are you going to allow sentimentality over Subject 401b to compromise you?" she asked. "Sir," she added a heartbeat later.

Luthor snorted. "Compromise," he said, thoughtfully. Glanced down at the photograph of the boy in his pod, who hours ago had punched his way through seven heavily-reinforced floors and a wall, shrugging off gunfire and taking down everyone who got in his way, except for those few Wayne had tackled himself. For a moment, Luthor wore an expression so complicated Waller was not entirely sure what she was seeing.

And then shook his head. "You know, I wonder what you expect. I'm President, but I'm not a politician. I fought a war, but I'll never be a soldier."

Waller pursed her lips again, almost stayed silent, and then raised her chin a fraction of an inch.

"Can I give some unsolicited advice, Mr. President?"

He flicked the fingers not occupied with the hidden weapon. "Speak."

"You accepted the position of President. That's done. Learn to be a politician, or this town will eat you alive." Or _we_ will eat you alive, she warned, with the tilt of her head and her firmly-planted feet.

In a way, it was a threat. In a way, it was a gesture of respect.

Luthor spun the abstract-looking lump of silicates in his hand, staring thoughtfully at its facets. "You know," he remarked vaguely, "when my company had just recently gotten off the ground, somebody told me that it wasn't enough to be ruthless, that if you wanted to get ahead in business you had to be vicious, and sneaky, and underhanded. 'Get out there and screw them before they can screw you.'"

He looked up at her, and smiled slightly. "I guess it comes down to whether, in a contest of stubbornness, you want to back me, or Washington D.C."

It was not, precisely, a joke. But it wasn't as straightforward a statement as it was meant to sound, either. Because Waller had done her research on the man, and she knew there had been more than a few times that Luthorcorp _would_ have gone under, or at least lost big, without underhanded, scheming, less-than moral tactics. Luthor _knew_ about those incidents, most of them. But he had never been involved. He'd always had vice-presidents on hand to do his dirty work.

His Vice-President now, in his political role, was hard-working and hard-headed, and able to make fairly hard calls, but he was also even more fundamentally honest than Luthor himself.

The President understood the need for people like her.

"I see," she remarked, nearly drawled, and Luthor snorted, set down his laser-paperweight with deliberation.

"Alright. I expect you have a transition of responsibilities to oversee at NSA headquarters. Please make sure to get David your formal resignation by the close of business tomorrow. You'll have a position again, after all of this, provided no more serious skeletons come out of the closet. In the meantime, I'm putting you in charge of the manhunt for Owlman. You'll get a small detachment of agents and some requisitional authority. _Don't_ do anything I'll have to reprimand you for. And treat the boy Jigsaw with _humanity_. Are we clear?"

Amanda thought about it. This was punishment duty, and also a show of trust, and also a test. In her opinion, she deserved all three. And she had every confidence in her ability to pass.

"Perfectly."

Her first order of business would be what it had been before she entered the Oval Office: find out how Owlman had escaped his cell. And make sure it never happened again.

* * *

**_A/N: _**_The Resolute Desk is a symbolically significant ornate wooden desk presented by Queen Victoria to the US, though FDR added the fancy front panel to hide his wheelchair. It's become customary to use it in the Oval Office, but it was damaged when Ultraman killed the previous President at the start of the Injustice War. So Alex doesn't have it. This is obviously the important thing here. ^^  
_

_The Director of National Intelligence is a real position, created in 2004. It isn't actually a very strong office, and doesn't have any authority at all over the NSA, but this is an alternate universe where Dick Grayson killed the President's son in 2001. By the way, 'David' at the end there is Alex's V.P., is Black Manta, who doesn't have a canon surname, making him awkward to use in an official context. Suggestions welcome. (It came down to him or Lois, and Lois _loathes_ politics, so.)  
_

_My original exposure to Amanda Waller was in the DCAU, where she has a better not-screwing-up record and is thus both more and less terrifying. In comics, she was part of the Luthor administration as Secretary of Metahuman Affairs, which is not a cabinet position that exists in this universe because no. (Also according to her wiki she's a widow, and some of her children are still alive; how has this never come up? And her doctorate is in PoliSci. O.o) And this is a simplified version of Superboy's origins, with some influence from the Young Justice cartoon. And, you know, Owlman. Ultraboy smash!  
_

_And apparently the mirror version of the Suicide Squad is evil versions of canon heroes, **publicly** tasked with **reconstruction **efforts. Heh. This may be an excess of reversal._


	40. Freebird VI: I Did Not Die

'I Did Not Die (And Yet I Lost Life's Breath)'

**_A/N: _**_This chapter more or less directly follows 'Hell's Heart (or High Water),' the chapter with the amateur vivisection, as a result of three separate requests from Mirielle, TheSoulsDepths, and SwordStitcher. Yay requests! :D (This is actually the one that delayed Jason's whole storyline by needing serious rewriting from its first-draft form, but I think I'm glad I bothered.)_

_A bronze plaque is referenced below. It is canon. There is a reference to hydrangeas. It is not._

* * *

They should probably have washed off some of the blood before taking Jason to Leslie.

A lot of it brushed off as it dried, especially when he'd gotten into clean clothes, nice soft fleecy things—Jokester had saved the Talon rags just in case Jason wanted to burn them later; he'd seemed to find it satisfying the first time—but he hadn't showered, or even washed his face. Everyone had been trickling back in in twos and threes from all the potential locations they _might_ have had to rescue their young Red Hood from, many of them fresh from beating up the unrelated or tangentially-related bad guys _they'd_ burst in on, and each of them had wanted to get a look at him and see him moving around and sane.

Jason, already tense, had started to give off telltale signs of feeling distinctly crowded, not to mention irritated by all the concerned expressions. Had rejected the idea of showering with a tense curtness that suggested if you knew him well that he wanted to wash that man's touch off, but couldn't bring himself to be that vulnerable yet. Harley was pretty sure he had already forgotten about the crusted blood.

She should have handed him a wet cloth or something to clean up with, but she hadn't thought of it. Too much in a hurry to get him seen by an _actual_ doctor, rather than someone like her or Jon Crane who'd gone to medical school for a psychiatry degree, and done a year each of their internships on internal medicine, and in Jon's case knew practically everything you could be taught and more you couldn't about neurochemistry, but had never really learned the ins and outs of things like tissue damage.

She trusted herself (and Strawman) for a fairly wide range of basic medicine at this point, or they wouldn't be running an unlicensed free clinic three days a week, but with Jason? When all the _obvious_ damage disappeared before you even got the chance to look? Oh, no. He needed an expert. And an MRI.

He hadn't wanted to go. If it hadn't been for J bringing up the dog bite to her shoulder, Jason probably would have put up more of a fight, and maybe even won, because balancing her worry that he might drop down dead against the thought of _forcing_ him to do anything, to go anywhere he felt unsafe, today of all days….

Well, she'd probably have worked around the problem by wheedling Leslie into coming to their safehouse to look him over. They were moving soon, anyway, and she trusted Leslie more than enough to let her know their address for a little while. Really, the bite was more a string of puncture wounds than a real _mauling_, and since the dogs had been _trained_ to attack and there was no reason to suspect rabies, Harley wouldn't have bothered going to the clinic about it, when they had all the necessary supplies and she'd had her immunizations, and most of her friends and family could put in a good set of sutures at this point. But it got Jason moving, so she didn't protest. Just pulled on a hat and jacket and moved with him.

Earlier, at home, Ella had grabbed Jason around the waist and held on until he promised to spend a whole day playing with her later, no matter what she wanted to play, and she'd considered that enough of a guarantee that he'd be back again to finally let go.

Harley wished her seven-year-old didn't understand so well about the fear that every time your loved ones left, they might not come home. She wished her sixteen-year-old didn't pet his baby sister's hair like he thought his own hands couldn't be trusted.

But Jason let Ella touch him, and Ella trusted him when he said he'd be back.

And now Jason stalked along between the two of them in their most normal clothes, he and J in identical red sweatshirts with the hoods pulled up, swigging away at a water bottle as he'd been doing pretty much continuously since they got him out. Every time she thought about the impossible mess of blood they'd found him in, her stomach turned over, and she had seen something dangerous in her husband's eyes, when Jason wasn't looking. Kept catching flickers of deep rage still, and J almost never stayed angry for long but she didn't think he'd really cool down this time until they stopped catching so many shard of devastation in Jason's eyes, or he managed to make the Owl _hurt_. Part of her—the part that had the Hippocratic Oath woven into its marrow—was glad they hadn't managed to corner Wayne today. (Though part of her wasn't glad _at all_.)

Their boy was moving normally now, but that didn't mean he wasn't in pain. Even if he was in agony he might not consciously _notice_; his pain tolerance alone was all the proof Harley needed to consign Bruce Wayne to a dozen centuries in Hell, and he had a worrying knack for relegating things he considered unimportant to the bottom of his priority queue and leaving them there. Occasionally he even forgot food, though the rest of the time he took it deadly seriously.

His eyes were very far away, as they moved up the street, and in reaction Harley found herself becoming steadily more hyperalert: this child under her protection (it didn't matter what he'd done or that he was within two years of his majority, he was _so young_ in so many ways) had been hurt, badly hurt, and if he wasn't reacting with the appropriate paranoia, somebody had to. She tried not to twitch. Jason would notice, and he probably didn't need any help being traumatized.

Unless he wasn't. Unless this had been _familiar,_ so much in keeping with the last three years of his life that it hadn't even registered as something that could cause a _new_ wave of trauma.

But no. Even if the torture itself somehow didn't faze him (and even if it weren't for the blatant horror of that gore-soaked dissection table, she unfortunately doubted that Owlman had such a bad estimation of his own methods as to be unable to inflict a level of pain to which he had not already inured his subject), she _knew_ Jason remembered his time as Talon with fear and pain and revulsion. And he had just found himself back in that madman's power, in the uniform he'd sworn he'd never wear again, bleeding. _Helpless._ His PTSD was going to be more easily triggered for a good long while, at the very _least_.

She wanted desperately to know whether he'd expected them to save him, but was afraid of the answer. In case it was _no._ In case it was _yes,_ but they'd taken so long he'd given up on them.

They'd come, at least. They'd saved the day. They hadn't _failed._

She met J's eyes behind Jason's back, a speaking look, and now they were approaching the clinic from the rear. "Wait here," Harley said, and Jason didn't argue, or ask why. He just stopped. The only sign that he was paying attention to the world outside his head was that he made sure to get his back against a building before falling into a waiting posture.

Harley peeled off, letting J stand guard. She circled the block, carefully, checking for surveillance or possible ambushes. Leslie's was a potentially obvious destination, after today. She wasn't giving the Owl evidence against the clinic, or walking her loved ones into a(nother) trap.

When she got back, Jason was still patiently staring into the distance, and she exchanged another look with her husband, lips pressed tight in worry. He let his lower lip catch on his teeth for a second, reciprocal concern, before smiling reassurance. She smiled back, her face feeling tight but her resolve spiking. This was not enough to defeat them. As they swung back into motion, the backs of their hands brushed together just before their eyes unlocked, and that helped, too.

Harley knew J didn't quite believe she thought he was beautiful, even after all these years—he didn't doubt her _love_, but she knew he would always see it as existing _in spite of_ his face, and that simply wasn't true. She knew he wasn't what was classically considered good-looking, and that the effect of the scarring was at first blush rather grisly, but she _liked_ his face. Liked the brilliant contrast of red against white, coloring dramatic as an arrayed geisha, and the long clean lines of his bones, and his warm hazel-green eyes. Liked the laugh-lines at their corners, and the deeper crease on the left side of his nose because his wry smiles almost always hitched higher on that side. Even the scars, after the first month or so she'd known him, had ceased to be an obstacle, and become simply part of _him._

She'd never give any member of her family up for anything, but all the same she sometimes felt a strong nostalgia for those first few years, when all either of them really needed was each other. Wished life could be that simple again. Or at the very least, she thought, glancing at Jason as she slid past him to take point once more and lead the way down the street to the back of the clinic, she wished she had a six-year-old's freedom to dismiss all concerns about abrogating people's bodily autonomy and pull her boy into a hug so tight he squeaked.

She used her key on the back door, and let herself in. Jason followed her through the door mechanically—and then stopped dead, just as the door clicked shut, as though a terrible realization had struck him, seconds too late.

Harley was torn, for an instant as she turned at his sharp halt, between alarm at whatever was wrong and relief at his sudden animation, even if it was new singing tension and the wary glint of eyes deep in a red hood. "We're on Crime Alley, aren't we?" he hissed, as his shoulders came up and his hands curled into claws. "This is the _Thomas Wayne Memorial Clinic?_"

"The _what?_"

Harley hadn't actually told him their destination, only that they were going to see a doctor—his previous exam, the one to make sure his altered physiology was stable, had been done by some sort of government super-soldier expert Luthor had lured into his R&amp;D department, who'd never seen his face for both of their safety. Not something they could arrange on this short notice. He hadn't seemed interested, so she hadn't bothered specifying. (Just in case he balked in reaction to some detail of the plan, which was bad of her, she was aware, but if someone trusted you to decide things for them, sometimes it was better to just _do_ so.) How did he know?

Jon had come here, after they rescued him and a few times since, and Ella'd gotten her shots here a few months ago, and Leslie had done a tricky bullet extraction on Harvey in the spring, but Jason had never had reason to visit, not with Talon's healing. How did he recognize it by the back room? (Well, he _had_ lived in this neighborhood as a child, that part was easy to explain.) And…was that the clinic's actual name? Not that the previous generation of Waynes had an especially bad reputation, but the name hung in today's air like a curse.

"There used to be a plaque," J realized aloud, meeting her eyes over Jason's shoulder, almost none of his very visible worry at the hunched line of the boy's back coming through in his voice. "Somebody stole it—must be twelve, thirteen years ago. Before your time," he told Jason. "How—?"

"He has this place watched!" Jason spat, huddling inside his oversized hoodie where Harley knew, because she knew him, he had to have at least one weapon concealed. Probably a lot more than one, after a day like today. "It's the one charitable cause he donates to that isn't just a tax write-off! What are we doing here?"

"_He _funds the clinic?" Harley found her own hands itching for a weapon to protect her family. _Everyone_ came here. Everyone who had nowhere else to go. Why would he pay for his own victims to be stitched back together? Were there…experiments?

"That doesn't make sense," J muttered. He'd fallen into defensive position facing the door they'd just come through, trusting Harley to cover the internal approaches. Though if a fight broke out Jason _would_ throw himself into the middle of it, recovering from hours of torture or not. "If this place is a trap…"

"It's not a trap."

The door that led to the exam rooms opened a second after that quiet statement, and Harley found herself face to face with Leslie Thompkins, the physician of Park Row. Found herself searching the familiar worry lines for some hint of whatever secret lurked under the steady generosity she'd unthinkingly relied on for most of a decade.

Found herself horribly aware that she'd hurried out of hiding without replenishing her depleted knockout gas supply, as if the streets were safe. As if they weren't being hunted. The tiny .22 revolver at the small of her back felt like wholly inadequate insurance, and her shoulder ached more fiercely as she tensed, her calves and the arches of her feet coiled to fly in any direction that proved necessary.

This place was supposed to be _safe._

Leslie's mouth tightened. "Harley," she said. "My clinic is not a trap. It's exactly what you thought it was."

"So what's Bruce Wayne's stake in it?" Harley shot back.

The old doctor's face pinched a little bit more. She was only in her fifties, but her hair had all gone grey long before Harley met her, and sometimes she seemed ancient. This was such a time, and half of the age was in the eyes. "It's the one thing he does to honor his father's memory."

'Memorial Clinic,' yes, but—there had to be something more to it. This was _Bruce Wayne_.

"He grows hydrangeas for his mother," Leslie added blandly.

Harley's stomach rolled. Maybe she should have felt something else, maybe just simple incredulity, but the idea of the monster she'd faced just hours ago, the creature that would tear a boy to shreds over and over again for the sake of its own bruised _pride_, the thing that had enslaved and tortured _her son,_ the idea that he could go home and care about a _bush_ because his mother had liked it—it was unspeakable. Obscene.

Owlman had no _right_ to be human.

"What, _personally?_" J drawled from behind. If he felt the same way, he was hiding it exceptionally well.

"I doubt it," Leslie replied, with the same dry unconcern. "Is that my patient behind you?" she asked Harley, who pulled her shoulders back for every millimeter of cool disdain she could muster, ignoring the pain that flared through the right one.

"No," she said. "I don't think so. We'd best be going."

She watched Leslie's old eyes, the sadness in them welling as she _accepted_ that, that rejection, because Doctor Thompkins was either too proud or too humble to fight for anyone's acceptance—maybe both. Accepted the fact of someone who'd come to her for help walking away without it. The patient was fit to walk, after all, and she had far too many claims on her to fight for one more burden.

There was nothing _wrong _about that, not really. Harley knew that. Leslie went beyond the dictates of her Oath every day. Accepting without argument that they no longer trusted her to treat them was _nothing, _compared to the fear of blackest betrayal that had just sung through Harlequin's veins. And if it was giving up, a little, it was giving up with the weariness of having given her whole life to a hopeless cause, for no better reason than because it was a battle that had to be fought, however punishing the odds.

Harley had recognized that idealism in Leslie Thompkins years ago, when she was new to Gotham's underbelly, and in her own heart taken the older woman as a mentor. She'd been in need of one. For justice and for love, she'd thrown herself into the abyss and hoped she'd learn to fly before she found the bottom, and if sometimes she wasn't sure whether she was really flying or if the chasm was just much, much deeper than she'd ever guessed—the wind rushed sweetly over the wings she'd built herself just the same, either way. And the company was the _best_.

But Leslie stood alone. She patched crazy vigilantes together with just a little more patience than she showed some of the _other_ idiots who came to her with the painful fruits of their own risk-taking, and turned a blind eye to the way a certain blonde volunteer had shadowed her like an intern for a year until a completely unlicensed free clinic opened up on the other end of the East Side, but she'd always stood apart, giving aid equally to all according to need, and never joining anything.

Standing apart, taking money from a demon. Fighting, but never believing she had a chance to win.

Behind her, Harley heard J lay his hand on the doorknob.

"Wait," said Jason, and must have lifted his head so Leslie could see under the hood to his blood-smeared face, because she went pale. Harley squinted between them, frustrated. Normally she _owned _her shortness, refused to regret it any more than her eye color; it was part of her identity, and it was useful in some ways, but when people _looked straight over her head…_hrm. "Why do you know that?" Jason asked, watching Leslie, and his voice was strange. "About the flowers?"

"Thomas Wayne was a good friend of mine." Leslie took a step toward them, eyes fixed on Jason, and Harley readied her last undrained gas canister to put her to sleep, just as she had the hyena hounds Jason had so worryingly seemed to overlap with himself. "Is that blood yours…?"

Jason snorted. "Yes." Hissed thoughtfully. "J? Harley? I think it's okay. He didn't really _do_ anything with this building. Just had me watch it sometimes."

"You…?" Leslie said slowly. Harley had seen this expression on her before, diagnosing a lump that they'd both known was breast cancer, on someone who could never pay for her own treatment.

"You sure you want to know?" Jason challenged.

The old woman heaved a sigh. "I have spent a long time carefully not knowing. I do not _know_ that my old friend's son is anything worse than a cutthroat businessman. By the same token, I do not _know_ that your caretakers stole twenty thousand dollars from him earlier this year."

"I helped," said Jason. Harley sighed. Jokester chuckled.

So did Leslie. "Come in, all of you. Let me see what's been done to you."

"That's a little bit of a tricky question," said J. "Jaybird? You okay with this?"

Jason hadn't taken his eyes of Leslie's face, but a twitch of a smirk moved the corner of his mouth. "Yeah. We're good."

Harley didn't try to stop Jason as he moved past her, pulling his hood back. If he was willing to trust…after the day he'd had, it was amazing he was willing to trust _anyone_, willing to walk around outside, willing to do anything but hide in a dark hole. Harley was proud enough of him to burst, and she couldn't be the one to drag his bravery down with _her_ fear. She resolved to keep a sharp eye on Leslie, but—when it came down to it, they still needed her. She'd had endless chances to betray them, over the years. Harley couldn't think of any reason not to have done so, that would go away because now they _knew_ she had ties to Wayne.

"So I'm fine, actually," Jason drawled, as he came into what would be Leslie's strike zone if she were the kind of person who conducted spontaneous physical assaults. "Harley got mauled, though."

"It's just a minor bite," Harley corrected. It would keep. "You first."

"You got dragged off your feet by a hyena. And the holes're _still there_." He turned to raise his eyebrows at her, leaving him even more open to Leslie, pointedly drawing a distinction between his 'possible remaining complications' and her 'definitely still obviously injured.'

"You don't have to be so stoic, Harl, nobody's gonna think less of you," J threw in, fondly, but with the note that said another message underlay what he was saying, and when she glanced at him, he flicked his eyes toward Jason.

_Go first_, _show him it's safe_. Harley smacked herself mentally for not realizing. Jason might be the one who'd decided to stay, but he didn't _know_ Leslie, and the idea of letting a stranger touch him right now had to be appalling. No matter how much he trusted the two of them, or how brave he was.

A hug was not what he needed right now, no matter how much it was what _she_ wanted to give. But feeling like he was protecting her, and seeing evidence that Leslie was a real doctor he was right to trust—she could give him that. So she would.

Jason stood right beside her while she sat on the table in the exam room, watching closely while J lounged near the door, as though waiting for Leslie to make a false move, or trying to memorize everything she did for future reference, or both. (She should ask him to help in the clinic more often, Harley thought. He had good eyes, and good steady hands, and so long as he could bring himself to be around strangers, it would be good for him. To help in ways besides violence.)

He snorted self-righteously when Leslie started grumbling about the definition of _minor bite_ and how this was not it, and Harley was almost too busy gritting her teeth against the antiseptic swabs rotating carefully _inside_ the punctures to snort back.

"Okay," he said, when all the toothmarks had been cleaned out and taped shut, and in the case of the two largest, sutured. "My turn?"

"That was the idea," answered Leslie. Harley wondered how much she knew about Talons, and about Jason. Was she close enough to Wayne to be at all in his confidences? Or was everything guesswork?

"Would you like us to leave, sweetheart?" she asked. Doubted it, but she had to give him the option. Doctor, privacy. It was a right.

Jason blinked, looked from her to J in his chair, deceptively lazy, shook his head, and stripped his sweatshirt and the tee underneath off over his head in one sharp motion. "It's fine," he said, setting the ball of fabric aside.

The blood on his chest had mostly flaked and rubbed away—Harley wasn't sure Jason even _had_ clotting factors anymore; his injuries never lasted long enough to scab and the blood tests Luthor's people had done hadn't found any, though they hadn't looked terribly hard—but it lingered in flecks, and wherever it could find a crease. His navel had the dried remains of what seemed to have been a pool of the stuff.

And his skin was unmarked. Harley wrenched her eyes away before she could make him any more uncomfortable.

Looked, of course, at J, instinctively, and caught the rage flickering in his eyes. She folded her fingers carefully around her other hand, to stop herself from making a fist.

They, too, were capable of unforgiveable things. Madness, paired with righteous wrath, and the sheer _fragility _of the ordered pace of life.

"Can you describe the injuries?" Leslie asked. "I need to know where problem spots are likely to be."

Jason hesitated an instant longer, and then started to talk. He didn't look at either of his guardians as he spoke, and the only sign of distress she could detect was how his hoarseness grew as he went, and the circles he began to draw on his right palm with his left thumb, when he got to the part where Owlman _impaled_ _his hands with daggers._

Harley listened, because she owed it to him, and tried not to think about the fragility of the things people built—houses, and corporations, and alliances, and laws.

How easy it would be to tear Wayne's empire down around his ears, if you didn't worry who would burn with him. How easy it would be, to break something that could never ever be mended. Harvey had gone over that line, once, and he was more than ready to provide reminder of why he had come back, of why he had let J stop him. That was how it had to be: they had to stand anchor to one another. No matter how dark the world grew, it was still not okay to darken it.

Jason was not exactly relaxed, as Leslie performed her examination with exquisite care, but he didn't seem like he was forcing himself not to bolt or lash out, either, which was promising. He shivered when the stethoscope touched him, but that could have been a purely physical reaction, and not an expectation that the cold metal would slice through his chest wall in the next instant.

Could have.

"Well, I can't find anything _obviously _wrong," Leslie concluded at last. "Which doesn't surprise me because Harley would have found it. At this point," she met Jason's eyes for this, "I really have to give an X-ray and an MRI."

"If you think you're up to it," Harley forced herself to interject, because she _really really wanted_ to be sure nothing had healed wrong in a way that was going to leave him dropping dead in a week, and that there were no foreign objects tucked in among his organs, and that he was _okay._

"You have an _MRI_ machine?" Jason asked, and considering they'd found him strapped to a dissection table Harley could see this being a problem, but he grinned. "_Bruce Wayne_ paid for the MRI machine you're going to use to make sure my insides are all lined up straight?"

"Both true," Leslie answered, dryly.

"Well," Jason said, with a roll of his shoulders that seemed to shed tension like water, "how can I say no to that?"

He looked at Jokester and Harlequin again, and they smiled, and meant it, because as awful as today had been, they had Red Hood back, and there was life in his eyes. He wasn't okay. Not yet. But he was moving forward. He wasn't letting this experience tie him down.

He was—always, implicitly, _absolutely_—free.

* * *

**_A/N: _**_Describing J from Harley's perspective was a headtrip and a half. X.x Gluh. He still looks like the Joker, I mean, bleh._

_An internalist is (surprisingly) not someone who works with the internal organs, but someone who specializes in the progression of disease in adults. In America, psychiatrists have to do a year of their medical residency on either that or pediatrics. ANYK. The request for Jason to get medical treatment from Leslie after 'Hell's Heart' puzzled me at first, but was actually good sense. I gave Jason (and Dick) one of the most absurdly overpowered healing factors in the DCU and then tweaked it so it had fewer downsides (i.e. zombie face), and nobody's complained yet, so I assume this is acceptable. But still. Getting complacent about healing powers you don't understand is a bad idea. _


	41. Honeymooning

'Honeymooning'

_**A/N: **So I'm slightly blocked on all the plotty and character-establishing chapters, but to avoid skipping two weeks, have a smallish absurdly fluffy thing. Recognition to a2zmom for 200th review! :D Love you guys.  
_

* * *

The second nickname came about after they'd been living together for two weeks.

They were in the bedroom, attempting to sort and fold their thoroughly comingled laundry—the confusion hadn't been _quite_ so bad at first, but the laundromat washers could always handle more clothes than the dryers, so you wound up distributing three loads of wet clothes over seven dryers, taking out whatever was dry before putting in another quarter, and combining the remaining wet things into one machine when possible, to save on laundry expenses, and so by the end of the process there had been no distinction left between his and hers. Luckily most of Harley's wardrobe was much, much too small for J, so sorting was easy, and both of them were perfectly competent to fold. They just kept getting _distracted._

Only a little bit by kissing, because Jokester had turned out to be shy and Harley was determinedly not pushing him too fast, but laundry had reminded Harley of how when she was little her mother used to do the laundry all at once like this, only with four people the heap had been a mountain on their parents' queen bed, and she and Barry used to burrow into the pile and try to surprise Mom. It was (she admitted) a good thing they'd never actually managed to surprise her, since they'd gotten in enough trouble for Barry's nose running on the clean clothes, but. It was still a good memory.

And that led to others, and…they'd gotten to know each other, before, in Arkham, but it had been across a gulf, both of them prying what they could out of the other, him censoring names and places and anything compromising, and her giving only what she had to to maintain professional rapport. This was different.

But there was still the chore to get through, and if the company made it seem less like a chore two pairs of hands were still not getting it done faster.

"Try to find my other purple sock, couldja?" J called, as Harley crossed the tiny bedroom to grab the second-to-last basket to be sorted. "I'm hoping it didn't get eaten by the laundromat."

"I hear ya, puddin'," said Harley.

J, not unusually, cracked up. "_Puddin'?_" he repeated, once he'd caught his breath.

Harley flung one of his collared shirts at his head, and he tossed it onto the pile to be ironed. "It's an _endearment_. You don't like it?"

"What, no, I love it, it's wonderful. Call me after any food you want."

"Eggplant?"

"How can I object?" he asked, shaking out lavender hair, which earned him a little chortle of acknowledgment that that really _hadn't _been as absurd a choice as intended. Harley's tongue poked out the corner of her mouth.

"Pickles."

"Fabulous! And briny."

"_Haggis._"

Jokester blinked. "Everybody's going to laugh at me, but that happens anyway, so…"

Bluff called and proven thus far unbreakable, she darted at him instead, poking at those spots between his ribs that she had recently discovered were (as if in recompense for the large patches of nerve damage in his skin) _extraordinarily_ ticklish. He squirmed and wriggled and fended with his elbows and did his best to get her back, but Harley was only really ticklish on her stomach and the soles of her feet, and as she was shot and clothed at the moment, these were tricky targets. "Give it up, puddin'!" she proclaimed, but of course he didn't. Eventually they almost knocked over the laundry and stopped, still giggling, and after Harley had stabilized the basket J swept her up in his arms in his most overblown fashion.

"My darlingest most scrumptious pearl onion," he declared.

"Okay, this has officially reached the point of completely disgusting," announced an unexpected voice. "I'd say I'll go away and come back when the honeymoon phase is over, but I don't think I've got that kind of time."

J had jumped when the speaker first made himself known, not away from Harley, but beside her, facing the door, with his left arm still slung across her shoulders. "Roman!" he exclaimed, laughing in recognition. "I didn't hear you come in, man!"

"You better _not_ have," the younger man snorted. He was standing in the doorway, arms crossed, his black mask dangling from his fingers by its string—he was rapidly approaching J's position on the Owl's most-wanted list, though for different reasons since he was _competition_, and while J relied on presenting himself with such bombast and flair that anywhere you couldn't see him right away you wouldn't bother to _look,_ Roman relied on a combination of concealing his face during business and real, excruciating _stealth_ to avoid being seen except exactly when he wanted to be. "Sorry to intrude, but I kind of need your input yesterday."

"Nah, hey, come in, pull up a stool. We were just doing laundry."

"Sure you were." Roman rolled his eyes, but he did come out of the doorway and grab the stool, though he didn't sit on it. His eyes flicked over Harley. "J-man. This is _confidential_, you know?"

Jokester's arm tightened around her, but his expression remained cordial. "Anything you can say to me, you can say to Harley."

Roman blinked, and then reached up to massage the bridge of his nose in the face of headache. "Oh ever-loving _God_, you're serious."

"I'm _never_ serious."

"Why am I friends with you?"

"Actually," said Harley, "Mr. Sionis? I understand your feelings. Since I _am_, in fact, a stranger, and not part of Mister J. So I'll just leave you to it, for now," she declared, shrugging out from under J's arm as kindly as was possible under the circumstances. Patted his wrist, looked Roman in the face until he looked back, and said, "but I do hope we can learn to trust each other, in time."

She smiled sweetly, made a kissy face at J, walked past Roman, and left the room, with a little more sway in her hip than usual. A few seconds later, there was the sound of the front door rattling open, and clacking closed. Black Mask glanced at Jokester, who hadn't lost the dopey smile with which he'd sighed her out of the room, and made a sound of derision. "You, my friend, are smitten."

"Mm-hm."

"And a dumbshit."

"Yeah. But isn't she _fantastic?_"

"Uh-huh. She's completely out of your league, in fact."

J narrowed his eyes a little at his friend. "Are you going somewhere with this?"

Roman sighed. "She's your legit first girlfriend, yeah?"

"Well, that I can consciously remember, at least. Are you _going_ somewhere with this?"

"Just…don't get hurt."

"Roman. Thanks for being a complete mother hen and all, but it's _fine_. What did you want to talk about?"

Black Mask eventually started to believe Harlequin wasn't going to sell Jokester out, or break his heart, but he never did stop making pained expressions when one of them pulled out another awful pet name. Half the time he had a mask on, anyway, which just made it easier to ignore him.


	42. Brought to You by the Letter S

'Brought to You by The Letter S'

**_A/N:_**_ Sorry for the hiatus, everybody! Four running stories is officially too much to juggle at once, especially with real-life commitments; I'm going to need to construct some kind of rotating schedule or Roofs, Till-Then, and Cirque are going to hold one another back indefinitely. That said, here is the next installment of the excessive quantity of Jason material that got dammed up behind 'I Did Not Die.' ^^_

* * *

Being recognized in the street as _Jason Todd_ had been a shocker—he didn't keep his last name secret, but he didn't hand it out much, either, and most of the casual recognition he got was as the current Red Hood, when the helmet was on.

He hadn't even really noticed he was near the building he'd lived in as a kid—Crime Alley was still his old stomping grounds, but he'd spent enough time there as Talon for all the personal associations from before to go a little blunt and dull, just from all the time he'd spent not acknowledging they'd ever existed.

And then Mrs. Walker had shouted out from her front window, _Jason Todd? Is that you? _Mrs. Walker from-across-the-hall. Mom had always said she was good people.

Mom hadn't been the greatest judge of character, though.

He'd gone up to her apartment. Not carelessly—Wayne might not have cared who he was besides Talon, but he was still the most likely person in the world to refer to him by his full name, and the sick sonuvabitch had already grabbed him from this neighborhood once, when he'd let his guard down—but he was armed and alert, and no place with glass windows to smash his way out through was going to hold him, if he had even a second to move.

Turned out there was no ambush. Just a cardboard box that felt like one.

There was a flash of Talon's cold rage when it turned out that she'd let the contents get leaked on, get wet_, _get maybe _ruined,_ even as she blamed it on her landlord (skinflint old bastard that he'd always been), but he shoved it down before she could see a hint of it, and practically stuttered in the effort to thank her appropriately.

She might as well be a total stranger, but she'd still taken the trouble and space to save his family's things for seven years, on the off chance Jason Todd still existed and might come back.

Well, he existed again, and even if life insurance that had gone unpaid too long to claim and the deed to a single acre of land in Virginia—why had his dad even owned something like that?—wasn't much, there were _photos._ From before everything went to shit. Christmas when he was four, fuck, he'd almost forgotten. Dad had a Christmas bonus that year and they had an honest-to-god roast that almost got burned. And Mom had saved all his report cards, from back when he'd still been in school. Harley kept trying to get him to study; he couldn't go to real school with Owlman after him, silver lining to everything, but a GED was doable.

Because he was still a real person. He had documentation. He had a _birth certificate._

And now Jason propped his elbows on the table in the back room of the Circus safehouse, small heaps of documents and photographs forming a sort of barricade around him, and wished he'd decided to retreat to his private little closet of a bedroom for this, instead of cleverly setting up beside the back door, where people might wander through and give him a chance to tell them about the box of mementoes without having to go up and _tell _anyone, like he was assuming they'd care.

What _were_ the odds of him getting back some of his old life now, like this, after everything?

He'd avoided the old place when he was living on the street—compartmentalizing, he guessed—and it was a good thing, because if Mrs. Walker had seen him back then, before Owlman took him, and he'd taken this stuff and stashed it, it would be long destroyed by now. He almost wished—but no. He'd have looked through it back then, too; he'd still _know_, it would just mean he didn't have any of this…stuff. And that he would have _known_ while Owlman was breaking him, and that…that could have been bad.

He'd glanced over the birth certificate carelessly, when he found it, noting the water damage philosophically, already moving it to an accessible corner of the 'useful' stack so he could wave it tauntingly at J if he came through later, and lord his superior documented status over the guy. _Jason Peter Todd_, right there, black and white. Really real boy, suck it. But then he'd noticed.

The name listed for 'father' was Willis Todd, which was what he'd expected. It would say that even if it hadn't actually been true, probably; his parents had had an okay marriage as these things went, especially when he'd been little, before money got so tight.

The name listed for 'mother' was a water-damaged smudge that started with a perfectly legible _S._

'Catherine' did not start with an S.

Jason's breath had gone weird in his own ears, and it took him a couple of minutes forcing slow breaths, and then a couple of seconds dipping into Talon's cold, distant killing-headspace, to steady out. (Harley said that was a bad way to deal with panic attacks, but he only had so much patience for trying it her way.) Okay, logic: maybe Mom had been one of those people who always used their middle name, and her real first name had been Susan or something.

Next document in the box was their marriage license. Catherine Mary Keaney became Catherine Mary Todd two years before Jason was born. Or at least, before the date on the birth certificate; he was prepared to doubt everything now.

The back door opened suddenly in a rush of cool autumn air, and Jason's hands slammed down on his papers before they could blow to the floor. He didn't even realize his face had stretched into a possessive snarl until he saw Croc (_Waylon,_ he was supposed to call everybody by their actual names) stock-still in the doorway, a few feet away, very consciously _not_ snarling back, with his eyes just about as wide as the heavy ridges of scaly skin around them would allow.

Jason took a long breath, curling his fingers away from the tabletop, but before he could work up to standing straight or maybe apologizing (hey, he'd had a freak-out without coming anywhere near wounding _anybody_; that was goddamn _progress_), Jones had raised one of his plate-sized hands in a gesture that seemed more _it's okay, no worries_ than _stay back_, which made some sense at least since Croc was the hardest of any of them to seriously injure and had less to be afraid of, and then stepped backward out the door again, and pulled it carefully shut.

He must've made good time around to the side entrance, because Jason had barely mechanically straightened the minor mess his hurried anti-wind-squish had caused, and definitely hadn't sat down again, before the door behind him, the one that led into the rest of the house, rattled carefully ajar. He turned around to watch as the faces of two clowns appeared in the gap—Harlequin first, and then Jokester just above her, no doubt plastered against her back out in the hall. They wore worried expressions that managed to be identical in spite of his disfigurement and her mask. Harlequin was in costume, J's hair was tied back; they'd been out working.

He could see them taking in the cardboard box and his paper ramparts, as well as the way he stood, with one hand still on the table surface like he couldn't risk giving up his claim to the territory by letting go. Jason wasn't sure what his face looked like, but they decided pretty quickly he wasn't going to scream at them for intruding, or try to rip their faces off or anything.

Jokester sidled in first—maybe it was a leader thing, maybe he was just the one who'd moved first, or maybe he was back to protecting his people from the rabid Talon; who knew—with Harley right beside him. She kept moving until she cleared the door frame and then pushed the door to, but not all the way shut. With some people, he'd have thought they didn't dare be closed in with him, but both of them _had_ dared, plenty of times, when he was doing way worse than a little silent snarling, and he knew Harley well enough by now to know that this was her way of making sure he didn't feel locked into whatever conversation she was planning to have.

He'd resent how they kept treating him like a feral monster, except, well, they weren't _wrong._ Wondered how Croc had described it. Croc who was so human under the scaly hide.

It had been months since they'd needed to tiptoe like this, since he'd been so close to the edge in his own head. He'd been free for almost a _year_. Shouldn't he have put it behind him more than this, now? Was he going to be like this _forever, _all broken edges and white-outs? Harley said a lot of it was PTSD. She said recovery wasn't a linear process. She said it was nothing to be ashamed of.

She could be stupid, sometimes. For somebody that smart.

"Jaybird," Jokester said after a few seconds, as Harley reached up and stripped her mask off. "What's up?" His eyes landed deliberately on the papers as he asked, and Jason rattled out a sigh.

The thing was, he hated how much of him was still Talon. Turned to violence and cold threat before anything else, could commit any atrocity without shaking hands or a sick stomach because a weapon had no use for guilt. Hated that part of himself more than anything, maybe more even than the twisted psychopath who'd done this to him, like he had the _right_ to just take people and carve them into the shapes he needed. But at the same time…it was so much easier to be Talon. Nothing could hurt Talon.

Not for long.

But he owed them an explanation. They'd taken him into their home, trusted him with their _daughter_, the only thing they loved more than each other, and with everything and everyone else, and if he was going to start…reverting under stress…in their house, he had to let them know _why_.

He would _never_ hurt Ella. But he didn't understand why anyone _believed_ that.

Finally, he just picked up the fateful scrap of paper and crossed the room, stiff less with tension than with the need not to move like Talon in front of them, no matter what his body wanted, and thrust it at Jokester, tapping the _S_ as the man reached up to take it.

"Mom's name was Catherine," he said, looking at Harley's knees instead of anyone's face.

It didn't take either of them long to understand.

"Oh, _Jason,_" said Harley, all gooey sympathy he couldn't quite face, and he turned away when she tried to give him a hug. She closed her hand on his forearm, though, and he relaxed into the pressure of it, steady as an anchor. She reached up with her other hand to pull off her mask, and said, like she understood why he wasn't up to hugging, "I'm sorry."

"It's gonna be okay," said Jokester, looking up from studying the paper.

"Catherine loved you," Harley told him, tightening her hand on his arm—like she'd known her, like she knew _anything_. Except she obviously knew exactly what he was thinking, and he closed his eyes and pulled away, making sure to be gentle about it so she wouldn't think he was angry.

"Yeah," he said.

Because that was the thing, wasn't it? The whole time he'd been Talon, been unmade at that bastard's hands into a thing to be used, he'd had the memory of when he'd been a person, when he'd had a mother who loved him. Had somebody _he_ loved.

Of course, loving her had hurt, too. So much, the whole time she was dying and medicating away the pain of it with whatever she could get her hands on, but he'd never stopped. Even once she was dead and he tried not to think about her too much. Even when _Jason_ was almost dead, replaced by Talon, and he'd almost never had to try. He'd still had that, tucked away in a corner of his mind, waiting to be prodded out of hiding by the sight of a mother standing between him and her kid, or the wild sincerity of _everyone deserves to be free_.

And now…

"_Ess_," said Jokester, contemplatively sibilant, and the letter expanded in Jason's mind in the sudden, sharp realization that it stood for a person; a real, actual _person._

"Do you think she's still alive?" he heard himself say.

Harley looked startled, and J blinked. And Jason was more surprised than anyone, seriously. To hear that almost-hopeful note in his voice, when he'd been so close to freaking out a minute ago. To realize he was able to think about whoever _S _was as something he might be gaining. But it was practically a conditioned response, at this point, to look for the bright side in everything J said, because he was so hung up on positivity that nine times out of ten that was what he meant.

Jokester and Harlequin traded looks again, Harley's tiny fingers clenching and unclenching in her mask the way they did when she was uncertain.

"No reason she shouldn't be," she said cautiously after a second.

No reason.

Except that she'd given him up. And if he'd killed her being born, well, he knew _that _wasn't his fault, or hers either. Just one of those things. But if she was alive, why else would she do that, give her baby to its daddy's wife? Because she didn't want him, or because she figured they could take better care of him. She was probably a whore.

Jason's mouth twisted with something like a smile at that, because hadn't they called him a whore's son back then? It'd never been true, though he knew he and Catherine had both looked at that trade sidelong and thought _maybe, if it gets much worse…._ But she'd been worn down to grey skin over bones by the time things got that desperate, and no one would have bought. And now it looked like maybe it'd been true after all.

Well, now he _had_ to know.

"Jason?" said Harley softly.

"I'm okay," he answered absently, turning back to the table.

Owlman's training wasn't all obedience and pain management and the best way to sever any given body part in one blow. There were critical thinking skills in there; Talon was _designed _to operate semi-independently at need, even if Jason's leash had never been as long as his predecessor's, so he needed tactical flexibility, and that meant being able to do things like analyzing data and evaluating courses of action. He'd had most of a year of involvement in wacky vigilante schemes since then. And Jason wasn't _stupid. _

So of course his attention fell on the obvious resource, lying discarded in the pile of useless items without sentimental value: Willis Todd's little black address book.

Knowing Harley and J were keeping a furtive eye on him, he picked it up again. Flipped to S—that level of organization felt weird, even if it was imposed by the format of the address book, but then Jason hadn't actually known his father that well, when you came down to it. He'd never had his _life_ in order and the apartment had always been a little chaotic, but maybe with small personal things he'd always had a system. He'd been really strict about his morning coffee ritual.

There were three women's names. Obviously this wasn't all the mom candidates, but it was a place to start.

"Sandra Wu-San," he read aloud. "Why is that name fam—_my loser Dad knew Shiva?_"

"_Really?_" Jokester squawked, and craned over his shoulder. "No way."

Jason shook his head in agreement. Willis Todd had been a _rent-a-minion_. Smallest of small-time crooks. Before that, he'd had some kind of factory job. How would he even have been on conversational terms with the most dangerous mortal woman in four continents? But there she was, two phone numbers and a mailing address—all long out of date by now, of course. "Could just be a coincidence," he pointed out. "Sandra isn't that rare a name, or Wu." San was rarer, and the combination even more limiting, but Asian-Americans could do the hyphenated marriage thing, too. And wind up with much less stupidly long names than stuff like Hasterfrau-Walters when they did.

Of course, if Jason was one half to a quarter Asian he'd expect it would show more. Probably.

_Probably._

"You heard where she is now?" he asked. He'd think about the other two names once he'd dealt with the one he _recognized._

"She was in Star giving the Archer trouble again, last I heard," Harley volunteered. "Since she, ah, avenged her sister she's been moving around a little less."

"I'll call around," J announced, straightening himself out the way he did sometimes so all his limbs stretched and popped at the joints and he got about three inches taller, and jerking his chin so his ponytail lashed decisively. "Somebody has to have her current number."

Jason blinked. Yeah, that was…a lot more normal than tracking her down and asking her personally, wasn't it. Plus less embarrassing if she wasn't. _Come on, Todd,_ he said to himself, with a little shake. _Snap out of it. This isn't an intel-gathering operation. You're not going to hunt her down and interrogate her._

_You are not Talon._

Talon wouldn't care about things like birth mothers, though. So maybe he'd be a steadying influence right now.

Jason wasn't weak enough to need him, dammit.

He shook himself.

"Now?" he asked, torn between unspeakable relief at something to _do_ and a desire to stomp on the brakes to give himself time to catch up. Tucked the little book into his coat pocket for now, self-consciously.

J's eyes flicked to it, and then up to Jason, but said nothing before he turned, snagged the cordless phone off the windowsill and held it up. "You wanna call?"

"You think this number is still good?" Jason asked dubiously. It was at least ten years old, and Shiva wasn't the kind of person who stayed put. He knew about her, because Owlman considered her a person of interest; she'd been hunting the serial killer martial artist Richard Dragon for years before she'd broken his neck in a public duel in Nanjing, and made a lot of other enemies along the way. Hadn't slowed down any since.

"We could try, I guess," Jokester shrugged. "But I meant you can make all the calls on this, if you want. It's your show."

His issue meant his show? Jason felt a little bit of smile well up; even if he died for it tomorrow, he was glad he'd ditched the Owl. "Nah, it's cool. I'm delegating the research phoning to you. You got the contacts."

J laughed. "That I do. Okay, Shiva, Star City…it's like four pm on the West Coast now…"

He called his best contact in Star, but they didn't have a number or location for Shiva. They said they'd keep J posted. No one picked up at the next number, and J pursed his lips. "Forget working by city; this could take all night. Trying somebody Shiva's worked with a few times," he announced, and dialed once more.

Jason tried not to fidget while they waited for the call to connect, and then J broke into a telephone kind of smile.

"Hey, Len? This is the Jokester…because it's polite to identify yourself on the phone?" J huffed a few seconds later, in response to whatever his contact said to that. "My voice isn't _that_ distinctive, what do…. Oh, now, that's just _cold_.

"Of course you've heard it before. Classics are classic for a reason. What, you want me to be all '_Mister Snart?' _Excusez-moi, Monsieur _Snart, _j'm'apelle—yeah, well, I like _my_ name, too. Is _so_ a real name.

"Fine, _Captain_." He laughed, the warm kind that still sometimes made Jason's skin prickle when it was aimed at him. He wondered if it made Captain Cold uncomfortable, that his Gotham counterpart sounded so pleased to be bickering with him. People usually liked J eventually, but sometimes they edged away before he had the time to wear them down and prove there wasn't a price for kindness.

Well. Not one Jason had encountered yet, at least, unless it was near-terminal annoyance.

"Looks like that's going okay," said Harley.

Jason had almost forgotten she was here. He tuned out Jokester's phone call—either he'd get the number or he wouldn't; there was nothing for Jason to listen for—and hitched up an agreeing smile. "Yup," he agreed.

"So…Ed and I will get started with researching the other two in the meantime. If you want, JJ?" Harley reached out as if to pet his hair, and then stopped, withdrew her hand. Smiled as if nothing had happened.

He nodded and said something along the lines of thanks, dug out the address book and gave her the information she needed to go rope Enigma and his computers into this, because he couldn't think of a good reason to _not_, but he had trouble pushing her out of his mind even after she left the room.

What had _that _been about? J touched him all the time, and Ella, and Harley had done a good bit of it too, though not usually so… He wasn't sure what word he wanted to use, but she didn't usually _pet _him. But she'd _never_ done that before. Aborted a gesture.

She'd put an arm around his shoulders and held on after finding him retching up his guts in the bathroom in the middle of the night. Held his hand the one time he'd broken down crying. Harley had stuck with him even when he tried to drive her away, which he'd done a lot those early weeks, when he'd had time to move on from 'incredulous euphoria' to 'blank terror' and most of the Circus were still treating him like a feral thing and trying to make sure no one was ever alone with him. Even on the day when he'd talked about the relative merits of garroting and slitting throats with all the nasty detail he could think of for forty minutes straight, waiting for her to snap, she'd just…been there.

When he'd been coated in blood after they sprung him the second time, she'd still touched him. But not now.

Maybe she just figured if he had a mom somewhere, he didn't need her anymore, so she didn't have to bother with him. With someone who'd hurt her and hers as many times as he had, with his fucked-upness and crazy. She had her own kid. This was always just temporary.

Some kids on the street used to talk about old foster-parents. The shitty ones, of course, the ones that made them pull up stakes and try to make it on their own, but sometimes the good ones, the ones they'd hoped or been promised would be 'forever families.' Some of them had been bitter, about the lie, but a lot of them had only been mad at the system that made them move on, not the families, and they'd sounded…

Jason called on Talon to make sure his face didn't give him away. It was easy, and no one would be suspicious; he wore Talon's face a lot by accident, when he wasn't paying attention. Maybe he should stop trying to break himself of that. It was safer, after all. Not broadcasting. Even without Owlman breathing over your shoulder, feelings could be exploited; why should he make that easy?

Part of Jason wanted to interrupt J and run after Harley and tell them to forget about it. The birth certificate didn't matter. Whoever gave birth to him hadn't wanted him then; why would she want him now? Why would knowing be worth even a small effort or minor risk?

But he couldn't make them want to keep him here, and maybe she _would_ want him. Maybe she _had,_ even, from the start, but thought he'd be safer with Willis. And Catherine? They'd been married already when he was born, and he couldn't remember ever not being theirs, so he must've gone into their custody pretty early. Catherine used to talk about changing his diapers; it would be weird if that was a lie.

It made sense that she'd sometimes forgotten to feed him, when he wasn't even hers. When he was the product of an _affair. _But it didn't make sense that she'd remembered all his birthdays until the last one. It didn't make sense that she'd never hit him or cursed him or—he knew parents, he knew stepparents. His mom had been weak, and he'd hated her sometimes, but he'd loved her, and she'd—she'd acted like she loved him. He would never have walked away as long as she was alive.

Never, ever. Because she'd been his. She'd been one of the only real things he'd ever had. The pain and the rage and the determination to survive, and Mom. _His_ mom. His.

He was so fucking sick of losing things, especially ones he'd already thought were as lost as they could get.

"Blue Jay. Hey. Little bird."

Jason blinked. Jokester was looking at him, phone in hand, wearing his serious face. "Hey," he grinned, when he saw Jason looking back. "Spaced out, there. Your face stop working again?"

"You are a massive dick," Jason informed him. Without reactivating his face.

J laughed. "Yeah, well. Practice." He waggled the phone. "Got the number. Worked as of last week. So you want to call up Shiva, or wait till we know a little more?"

Jason licked his lips, thinking. If they dug around enough, they might not need to cold-call anyone. On the other hand, if they called her and she was it, then the uncertainty would be over, bam, just like that. Issue resolved.

The impulse to hold back and gather all relevant data so the situation didn't get out of his control was there, and strong, but it was Talon's. Red Hood was part of the Circus, and he took unnecessary risks without being ordered to, and he wasn't afraid of talking to people. "Dial," he said.

Jokester grinned. He looked proud enough that Jason thought maybe he knew exactly what struggle had gone on there, but maybe all he knew was Jason was being brave. "I hear and obey," he chuckled, and hammered in eleven digits with a flourish before passing the handset over to Jason.

Phones made him uncomfortable. He'd never said anything, but he was pretty sure Harley had noticed—it was something about the sound of a mechanized voice in his ear, he was pretty sure, the way Owlman had perched on his shoulder and pulled his strings through the earpiece even when they were apart. That, and having to rely on just words and machine-distorted tones of voice to read people, without all the nonverbals to tip him off to the subtext and the lies. He punched the speakerphone button with his thumb as the ringer at the other end of the line spun out.

What were the odds Shiva would even pick up? She moved around a lot. They didn't even know if this was a cell number; she was a serious martial artist, she was probably all traditionalist, would be five to five hundred years behind on any given technology. And wouldn't want to be tracked; Owlman couldn't be the only one who could do that trick with cells. He'd probably get an answering machine any second now.

He knew he was staring at the ringing phone in his hand like it was a live grenade he wasn't allowed to throw, but he didn't want the first thing he said to a potential Mom to be in Talon's voice, and that was the only way he could have stopped.

On the seventh ring, there was the rattle of a corded phone coming out of its cradle, and the moments of silence that it would spend passing from there to someone's ear seemed to stretch for ages.

"Hello?" came a clipped voice—deep for a woman's, without any real accent, and standoffish without being wary.

"Sandra Wu-San?" he checked. He only sounded a little tense, really. And he didn't sound like Talon.

"Who's asking?"

"This is the Red Hood, calling out of Gotham."

She seemed to take a few seconds to think about that. It wouldn't be strange if she hadn't heard there was a new one; he'd only been active for a matter of months, and hadn't been causing that many waves, since he was mostly working within the established patterns of the Circus, but she must have after all, because she didn't challenge the name, or ask him to prove it. "This is Shiva. What did you want?"

Not the secret identity type, huh. Might as well cut to the chase.

"Do you have any children?" Jason asked, feeling his heart pick up in spite of his training. He could do worse for a mom. He really could. Shiva was a little…_out there_, but she was good people. She had pretty good excuses for not raising her own kid, as many people as wanted her dead. She was strong. And she was just bloody-handed enough herself that maybe she could accept about Talon.

Hell, if she was his mom she'd probably be willing to train him. Then he'd be _better_ and have less of the Owl in his style.

Shiva was silent for three torturous seconds. "You've found her?" she asked. Her voice was so flat he couldn't tell whether she was homicidal or wrestling with hope like he'd been a second ago, but his stomach knotted up so much at the word _her _that he was glad he'd opted for speakerphone, because J swooped in and took over for him.

"Sorry," said the clown, plucking the handset from Jason's numb fingers. "Sorry, no. We had a lead a kid might be yours, but it's a boy. You're missing a girl?"

"She'd be ten this year," Shiva confirmed, woodenly. There was even less tone than there'd been before, and Jason could tell now that it was a shield, the same way he kept using his training, and she really would have been the perfect Real Mom. Fuck everything. "Her father walked away with her while I was still bedridden after the birth."

Jokester grimaced, showing all his teeth in a deeply sincere expression he wouldn't have used face-to-face with anyone but family because it looked too utterly freaky on him. It worked on the phone, though, practically pouring sympathy into the mic. "Aw, _man_. I'm sorry. We'll see what we can do, wow, why didn't we know about this? Who's the kidnapper?"

Jason knew he should care as much about this missing girl as J evidently did, and probably he would care, some, later, but right now everything he had was going into crashing. He didn't get an awesome and slightly terrifying new mom out of this. He still didn't have anywhere to go if he used up his welcome here. _Maybe_ one of the others—who probably wouldn't conveniently be in the address books of people Jokester knew—would turn out to be his original mother, but that didn't mean she'd be any use, or have any interest in trying.

Gamble, failed. He flipped open the little black book to 'S' again. Sharmin Rosen. Sheila Haywood. Or bust.

Well, or try to get into Gotham City records and find out what his birth certificate had said before the damage, without attracting Owlman's attention. He'd never had the slightest interest in Jason's background—he'd been an orphaned nothing, born from dirt, as far as the bastard had cared; he probably thought that made for more impressionable clay—but he'd love a way to strike indirectly at the Red Hood. Jason wasn't about to expose his mom to danger just to find out who she was.

* * *

**_A/N:_**_ A lot of this is taken directly from 'A Death In the Family,' including Mrs. Walker and the little black book. Nobody knows how Willis Todd knew Shiva. Furthermore, Sandra Woosan's backstory has managed to get less coherent and _more offensive_ with every successive retcon, so I did what I could. Canon Shiva claimed to have no kids when drugged and interrogated by Batman and Robin; a few years later, along comes Cass. (David Cain is not, technically, a supervillain, having neither trade handle nor costume nor gimmick, so he's exactly as he ever was.)  
_

_I didn't change Captain Cold's name because it's not an especially evil one. And yes, his real name is Leonard Snart, which is really fun to say out loud._


	43. Bullet I: Your Best Shot

'Give It Your Best Shot'

**_A/N: _**_Hey to all you wonderful people who have not given up on me! We are back from months of banging my head on a wall made of high editing standards, writer's block, and distractions. With a chapter in which Jon and Basil (aka Strawman and The Reformer, aka Scarecrow and Clayface) actually do things! Hopefully posting this will get me back into the groove. This is still my favorite current fic and I refuse to stop working on it. On we go!_

* * *

Red Hood's sword flashes out in one of Talon's moves, licks along Strawman's thin arm, and arcs around, trailed by a stream of Jon's blood, to jab for his throat.

And it would sink straight in, parting flesh and sinew for good, except that before the steel can bite, the Reformer hits the Hood like a mudslide, bodyslams him straight through a carved wooden chair and into the wall. For whole heart-stopped seconds it seems like that will keep him there, plastered under everything Basil could find to throw, and then the lump that is Jason thrashes, heaves, and then _slices _its way out through the clinging claylike stuff. It doesn't really hurt Basil, of course, but it does set Jason free, and he lunges without hesitation at Enigma even as his chest is still heaving to counteract the brief suffocation.

When Enigma's stick bats the oncoming blade aside, so it only cuts a shallow gash through the side of his scalp to match the one on his leg, and lodges deep in the wood of the polished chest of drawers behind him, it's more luck than skill. Than something Ed has _any_ assurance of repeating. So he moves, as fast as he can, away and out into the center of the room, while Red Hood (still in the heavy denim and leather layers of his costume) flips himself smoothly up onto the top of the impaled bureau, so he can pull his weapon free without bringing the furnishing down on his head.

Launches, from that crouch, into a long arc that should land him roughly on top of Enigma, more acrobatic than he's been since before he hit that last big growth spurt and started to really fill out, but the Reformer swells up to intercept, throwing up new hands one after another to wrap and bind and _stop_ even as Jason does his level best to get at someone, anyone he can hurt.

For a second, Basil gets Jason pinned down, twitching in the gooey loops of his body, more inhuman in extremity than he ever likes to let himself get, and Strawman and Enigma dart in, the former with an aerosol of his best knockout gas and the latter with nothing but his cane. Jon squirts one puff of the blue stuff straight in Jason's face, and _that's_ when their rogue does some kind of bucking, _twisting _thing to free himself, and very nearly takes both their heads off in one swipe.

Only fails because Basil, realizing that they'd been played, lashed out just in time with a shapeless limb and knocked their friends back, out of harm's way.

Jon sprawls across the floor, Ed bounces off the side of the towering four-poster bed; Red Hood still almost successfully skewers the latter with a last-ditch lunge, which turns into an imbalanced _lurch _as a bullet, fired from less than twenty feet away, drills into his left shoulder, throwing him almost into a spin.

Nearly falls, leaving himself open to the Reformer's next tackle, and loses his sword to a clay-lump that envelops his arm. The shoulder wound is already healing up, lead plug that had buried itself in his shoulder-blade rattling to the floor, and as he returns to fighting his way free of Basil Karlo's _expansive_ approach to wrestling, there's no sign that Strawman's sleeping gas had any effect. Which is not normal, even for a Talon.

Jason's gaze falls on Jokester just once, as he struggles, as he covertly wings a knife not meant for throwing at Strawman's heart and it glances off his ribs. If there's an expression in his eyes, it's too subtle to see at this distance, but his lips move. Silent, and slow, and unmistakeable even as his limbs fight Basil's protective hold with a maniacal, mechanical intensity that only normally appears anymore when he's desperate to save somebody.

_Please, J._

Jokester swallows. Knows he's reached and passed the limit for how long he can stand here, doing nothing. Even though he has no real option about the standing, and all too few about the _something_ he can do.

_"Silver bullet to the heart,"_ the ghoulish waste-of-air that did this said. Chuckling, a cultured, detached sort of chuckle J _**did not like**,_ though could be he's prejudiced. _"A traditional mode of putting down a monster. The only way to break the curse. Any silver would do, of course, so long as it pierces the heart, but I find that's rather a tiresome organ to access with, for example, a spoon._"

And then he _threw a silver bullet _right at J's face, and _disappeared._ That rolling Oscar Wilde chuckle trailing behind him.

J's hand flashed up to catch the bright, tiny thing before it could black his eye, and as soon as he touched it, some invisible force lashed out of nothingness and pinned him magically to the spot. A sitting duck for the rampaging Red Hood, if their three still-mobile friends hadn't been throwing themselves in the way, trying to bring their youngest member down before he could kill anybody.

Or at least lure him into another room, where he could try fruitlessly to dice Basil until the rest of them figure out how to fix this, what to do about a compulsion like _kill until he runs out of targets, and then turn on himself._

And it really shows precisely the _kind_ of twisty black-hearted sadist Jason Blood has always been, that he targeted their Jason for this. Jason who has had a lifetime's worth and more already of being forced to kill, of having his choices taken away. But also Jason who, of all of them, can survive the cure.

Who can probably survive it.

Might.

…they'd never even consider it, if it were anyone else. Even if they asked, like he _knows_ Jason just did, because that young man would never beg for his own life, especially not when anyone else was in danger.

If Heat Sink and Deep Freeze had only made it this far, instead of having to stop and do emergency repairs on Freeze's environmental suit after Etrigan trashed it. (Not that it was Etrigan's fault, J knows; he seems alright, for a demon, but he doesn't have a _choice_, any more than Jaybird does right now.) The ice duo are good at immobilization, and Jason would have a hard enough time successfully killing himself with _full_ mobility, never mind pinned in ice while they worked on a solution…maybe they could get a long, thin silver _pin_ to pierce the ribcage and—

The bullet, cased in some chrome-shiny metal he doesn't recognize, is exactly the right size to go in his revolver, because of course it is, and his hands already started to swap out the round in the top chamber by feel when Jason said _please_. Then he had to tear his eyes off the fight to make sure the cylinder was lined up okay and the gun wasn't jammed or anything, and now he's hesitating. He never hesitates. Waits, sure. Pauses, yes. Creates dramatic tension, he does that. Occasionally, he waffles. But hesitate?

There has to be another way. Jason always sees himself as expendable, and he's always been so wrong.

The Red Hood presses his emergency taser-button into the middle of his opponent's face and lets out the full charge, and Basil seizes, shouts, and sinks into a puddle of brown goo.

Unhesitating, the assassin reclaims his sword from the mess and lunges for Enigma again, on the apparent basis of his being the closest warm body.

_Strawman_ hits him in a flying tackle, this time, which is marginally effective mostly because Jason never expected it. It's not that Jon isn't brave, because he is, he's the bravest, considering he's scared of _everything_ and he still does this with them; it's just that Jason outweighs him by a conservative hundred pounds. Then in the next instants the ensorcelled Hood has taken control of the tackle, turned it into a roll, and pinned Jon under him. J got a look at his face, as they grappled—blank. Perfectly expressionless. More perfect than it was most of the time even when he was Talon. As unreadable as his back, now, as he draws himself up, keeping his victim in place with a knee on his diaphragm. Jon gasps, and claws, and his feet kick at nothing, and it doesn't matter.

The sword comes up—slower than necessary, pointing straight down as though to dramatize the imminent bisection of Strawman's throat, but still not slow enough for Ed to get there in time, even though he's sprinting flat-out across the room, straight through the muddy puddle of Basil, lurching on the injured leg, with his question-mark-cane held over his head like a club.

Last second. No hesitation from the Hood. Jon's going to die. Jason said please. Jason's had so many choices taken away from him.

Jokester takes the shot.

* * *

**_A/N: _**_…evil Jason Blood turned out kind of reminiscent of Marvel Comics' old-school Loki. Heh. Blood's always been a headgamey bastard in any universe; flipping him was weird since his and Etrigan's whole _thing_ is the juxtaposed duality of good and evil and to what degree there's even a meaningful difference. (I left demons generally evil for the same reasons gravity on Earth-3 is not a repulsive force and the planet is not a cube. The story requires a recognizable conceptual framework for the mirrored characters to run around in.) Etrigan _is_ per canon enslaved by magic, which would not go over well with Jokester under any circumstances.  
_


	44. Bullet II: You're to Blame

'And You're to Blame'

_**A/N: **Horribly delayed sequel to 'Give It Your Best Shot.' See foot of page for warning._

* * *

The instant the pale bullet leaves the barrel, Jokester feels the bonds around his legs vanish. The fraction of time it takes for the shot to reach its target isn't enough to make any significant movement, but it is enough to think a huge flood of frustrated thoughts, because if all it took was _firing _the thing to get him out of here, they maybe could have drawn this out after all.

(Though it's magic so maybe the _firing at Jason_ or _firing at Jason's heart _intentions were also conditions, which'd mean shooting it anywhere else might have left him rooted to the spot in Jason Blood's bedroom _forever_. Which doesn't mean he shouldn't've tried it. _Crud._)

Then the bullet has hit and Jason crumples, just like any normal person shot in the back, his sword clattering to the ground beside him without ever touching Jon. And the Jokester is already running, getting to Jason just too late to stop him falling onto his back, cupping a hand around the back of his neck and running the other over his chest, looking fruitlessly for the exit wound. Jason's eyes are closed.

He hears himself babbling, a long way off.

"I'm sorry, Jaybird, I'm so, so, sorry. JJ, look at me, come on, _Jason._" His thumb can't find a pulse, his palm can't find a heartbeat, which means his marksmanship was probably A+, straight to the heart, go Jokester.

He's been here, like this, too many times. Because Jason thinks he's expendable. Never quite like _this, _or they'd know whether he could survive a magic silver bullet to the heart. But _like _this. The Martian invasion, to take an example, was one long parade of near-death experiences for everybody. But J's never been the one who did the shooting, before. (Not that this is the first time he's shot Jason ever. Because shooting out Talon's knees was always a good way of slowing him down when you were running away. But that was different, that was so different.)

Tiny, tiny breaths still whisper through the slack mouth, though, and when he pries up one lid the blue eye shuttles, not alert but alive. Talon. It's strange how J can hate wholeheartedly that anyone has ever been put through that, let alone anyone he loves, and yet thank all his stars roughly once a month that his boy is all but unkillable.

"J…" It's Eddie, standing over them with his hands wrapped uncomfortably around the middle of his cane.

Jon has folded up to sitting from where Jason had him on the floor and is watching, hands clasped together in his lap. He's panting raggedly beneath the rough brown fabric of his mask, trying to make up for that long suffocating half-minute he spent with Jason's full weight pressing under his breastbone. Still bleeding where Jason's knife sliced into his chest, and from his arm where the sword caught him earlier. They'll both take stitches, but they're flesh wounds. They'll keep. Jokester rips his eyes away ruthlessly. Drops them back to Jason.

He's not healing.

"We have to get the bullet out," J says, and then snorts with half-hysteria at himself, because there he goes, spouting the worst medical-drama cliché of failure to understand actual medicine, and Harley would swat him upside the head. Except she'd agree it's _true, _this is Jason who doesn't need normal treatment but definitely can't keep the magic bullet in his chest.

"I'm not a surgeon!" Strawman moans, already digging into a pocket for the sealed packet of sterile gloves he keeps in case of field medicine. He's rolled up onto his knees while J wasn't paying attention.

"Well, good, because we don't have a surgical theatre for you. He's not gonna make it to Leslie's."

Jon nods, absently, irritably, already falling into the jerky patterns of motion he uses when he has to be in control of a situation, whether he thinks he's up to it or not. Reaches up and rips his mask off, because it cuts into his vision and he'll need to see for this, drops the burlap like trash on top of his gloves. "Get that table cleared off," he orders Ed, as he loops gauze around the wound in his forearm.

"On it," huffs Basil, surging up abruptly out of the puddle Jason's electrocution left him in and into his own shape again, like a piece of poorly animated special effects in fast forward, and then staggers against the edge of the cluttered table, knocking over an unlabeled tall purple bottle, which clinks ominously against the other bottles and jars of what are presumably magical paraphernalia, though for all J knows they could be cologne.

"Not like that!" Jon yelps, and then shakes himself back into Doctor mode. "_You_ sit down," he tells Basil, so firmly that the awkward angle of his wrist as he knots his bandage tightly almost fails to seem absurd. Someone should have helped him with that, Jokester notes distantly. He should have asked someone for help.

"Knife," Jon commands J, as Ed goes to start gathering things from the worktable and dumping them onto the first available surface, which appears to be Blood's sumptuous canopied bed. J hands over his smallest knife, which Jon uses to slice Jason's shirt open, and then the two of them slide him carefully out of his jacket and the remains of the shirt—it was a nice shirt; he's going to be mad, though if he really cared about it he wouldn't have worn it into a fight, with his rate of injury. Unless he's been forgetting to do his laundry, or something.

J knows he should go help Ed get the table clear—Basil already is, against orders, in a cautious, creaky sort of way, although creaky for him means bending where he doesn't look like he has joints—but he can't tear himself away from holding Jason up and making sure those thin, thin breaths are still coming in and out.

How much good can breathing _do,_ if he doesn't have a heartbeat?

"Forward, now," Jon says, and between them they tip the young man's face into Jokester's shoulder to get a look at his back, where the entry wound has stopped bleeding, but not closed. "I'm going to have to go in the front," Jon says, worrying at the corner of his mouth with a canine tooth. "Scapula is too much in the way from the back." He raises his eyes to J's, solemn. "And I'm going to need either a bone saw or some kind of rib spreader. This is going to be nasty, J."

He feels his hand tighten on the back of Jason's neck, protective, like holding him tighter could possibly help. "I can handle it."

"J—"

"I can _handle _it. Let's stop wasting time." Jason doesn't have much of it.

Jon nods, and that's when Ed bustles over with Blood's fancy brocade bedspread. They lift Jason onto it and then each grab an edge to carry him to the table, as carefully as they can manage but inevitably with swaying and jostling that _can't_ help his condition. Talon's injuries are governed by different rules than the normal ones, but so are magic bullets, and normally J is perfectly okay not knowing exactly what the rules are for things, but at moments like this he wishes—

"I wish Waylon were here," Jon mutters, bending over his patient, and Jokester has already opened his mouth to say no, that was not how that thought ended, and anyway, why Waylon? Then he gets it.

Jon needs something to serve as a rib-spreader. Waylon's hands would do nicely.

And J almost sicks up, because he already had to kill Jason once today, and now Jon is having to vivisect him; it seems like a jerk move to wish the dismembering experience on Croc. He's always had the strength and the claws to tear a human being apart if he wanted, but he's never _done _it. Never would. But if he had to—if a friend _needed_ him to—

"I can do it," says Basil. And he's an actor, and a shapeshifter who doesn't actually have blood anymore, so that expression of calm resolve and his face's failure to have lost all its color don't actually mean much, but it's a nice gesture. He kept almost all the hoarseness out of his voice, even, and what's left he could blame on the electrocution if he had to. "You know how strong I can be, if I shift right," he tells Jon. "Make the incision. I'll do the rest."

"Here," Jokester says abruptly, straightening from where he spent the last few seconds digging into the sheath in Jason's left boot so he didn't have to look any of his friends in the eye.

The knife the Red Hood keeps there is single-edged, thin as a whisper, sharp as a lie, and curved at the tip—the most like Talon's knives of anything he carries, because it's his holdout, last-ditch weapon and needs to be the thing he can use the most instinctively. It's also the thing most like a scalpel in the room, unless Blood considerately left them one, and even then J would rather risk the six-inch combat blade they can at least trust not to be cursed or poisoned.

Jon looks at it with a kind of weary, accepting horror, and Ed says, "I found a bottle of brandy when I was clearing the table. Sterilize?"

Talon's system is better against infection than most, but it's not 100%. On the other hand, potentially evil brandy in Jason's _heart._

"I have hand sanitizer and antibiotic ointment," Strawman says firmly, already pulling them out of more of his endless pockets. "This is barbaric enough without decanting liquor into anybody's internal organs."

He holds up the little blue spritzer of his standard sleep formula then, smudged already with bloody fingerprints from the fight. "Think I should risk it?"

J's teeth crunch down on the scar that runs the inside length of his right cheek. Tasting blood does _not _help his state of mind. "No," he makes himself say.

They're going to cut into Jason's chest and rip him open and dig into his _heart,_ and no one should have to live through that with any degree of consciousness.

But the kid is probably riding the edge of slipping away already. He already had a solid dose, and even if it didn't seem to affect him it's probably still in his system. They can't afford to suppress his brain function any further, even to spare him. God knows Jason can take a lot of pain.

Jon closes his eyes. "Alright, then," he says. Carefully wipes and sterilizes his hands and his surgical instrument, before he pulls the latex gloves on, and then spreads some of the sanitizer over Jason's chest, gently, like it matters. Like any germs that can't handle Purell are likely to be a problem for Talon's immune system, or like there's any chance of Jason surviving if his healing factor _doesn't_ come back online once the magic bullet is out. Jason shivers as the alcohol-based gel sucks the heat out of his skin, eyelids fluttering over sightlessly staring eyes, and he looks so _young._

_Get on with it!_ J wants to snap, so much he's biting his tongue now just to shut himself up, because Jason may not have the time to waste, but _he_ already made his decision. He took his shot. If Jon carves the kid open and _then _he dies, Jon needs to have done this. Followed something like the right procedures, as well as he could.

"J, Ed," Jon says, very levelly. "I need you to hold him down. Just in case." Because Jason hasn't shown any sign of awareness or capacity for voluntary motion since he went down, or reacted specifically to the feeling of a bullet in his heart, but if his hindbrain is online enough to breathe and to shiver…it will probably react to this. How could it not?

J almost taps out right then—almost insists they use the sleeping gas after all, or lets his eyes roll up in his head and falls into a faint so he can get out of living through this nightmare. But he's taught himself too well and too long to push onward through things that hurt for that to happen by accident, and he _won't _ask more of someone else than he's willing to give, he _won't—_and so he locks gamely onto Jason's right arm with all his strength, opposite Eddie on the left, while Basil pours himself over Jason's legs and rears up, his arms swelling to five times their natural size and then tapering, where he should have hands, into two tiny, flat paddles.

And Jon steps up, takes a deep breath, and makes the first incision.

Jason doesn't scream. Jokester isn't sure whether that's the worst part or a small mercy, but he _doesn't_ scream, and he barely flails. More than anything, J hopes Jason doesn't know it's them. Because there's no way he's coherent enough to know _why_ they're doing this, to understand about emergency surgery, but—it took so long to make the kid believe it didn't matter what he used to be, that they weren't going to drop him, or turn on him, that they weren't going to realize one day how much blood he had on his hands and start blaming him for it.

And he _just_ tried to kill them again.

If he knows what's going on, even a little, if those staring eyes are taking in Jokester clamped onto his dominant arm, trapping him, Enigma on the other side, Strawman standing over him with the burning knife, Reformer prying him open like an oyster to get at his heart…he's going to think it's a _punishment_.

He's going to think it's punishment he _deserves_.

Basil is sliding those paddle-hands into the gap Jon's created between Jason's ribs, and then he starts to pry.

_Now_ Jason screams, rough and high and inhuman, spasms and J almost loses his grip but clings tight, hands locked around Jaybird's wrist, body folded around his strong right arm to hold the shoulder in place as Jason's fingers dig into the back of his hand, clawing. If it weren't for the protection of their gloves, J would be bleeding too. Like Jason, whose blood has saturated a wide patch of the fancy bedspread and is beginning to drip out of one edge and onto the floor, like Jon whose bandages are beginning to seep red as he works grimly, slicing apart layers of tissue one by one. Has to get to the heart without hurting the lung, minimum goal. He wasn't ever trained for this.

"Basil, I need a little more room to work," Doctor Crane murmurs, and the Reformer prizes the gap a little wider.

It looks almost like Strawman is digging, now, as he disappears up to the wrist. Long narrow hands digging and slicing inside the chest cavity, and J looks away much too late to keep this out of his nightmares (no one expects him to have nightmares) until finally, _"There," _Jon is saying, and making one last precise cut before plucking an impossibly small, blood-covered knob out from the straining gap between Jason's ribs.

Sets it aside, on the table next to the patient because they don't have niceties like kidney-shaped dishes, and then dives back in, pressing all the things he cut apart back together so Jason's electrum-enhanced healing will have as little work to do as possible.

They've seen another former Talon, carved into sixths and set on fire, fail to recover from that final death. Jason isn't actually immortal. There is a point at which his body _will_ give up.

And his struggles have become so weak now that Jokester can afford to unwrap one arm from holding him still and hold it over the young man's lips, to sense the ghost of breath against the cuticles, more a spread of warmth than a gust of air pressure.

"Come on," he hears Eddie muttering, now that he can spare some strength from using his full weight to pin Jason's left arm. "Come on, kid, you aren't going out like this. How many wizards does it take to change a lightbulb, come _on_."

_Depends on what you want it changed into._

J's mouth shapes itself around the words noiselessly. He doesn't say them. Eddie probably doesn't realize he said anything. They hold on.

Their part of the job gets easier and easier and Jokester doesn't think he's ever wanted something to be difficult this badly in his _life._

"Okay, Reformer," Jon murmurs at last. "Let it go."

Basil's hands draw back carefully, splitting into fingers again as they go, and then he collapses, sliding off the end of the table like a spilled jello salad. He has legs again by the time he hits the floor, but they wobble, and Ed lets go of Jason's now-limp left arm to dart down and steady Basil, help him stay standing without having to give up the comfort of a human form. He's there almost too late, and J realizes distantly that normally, that probably would have been him; that Eddie was expecting it to be.

He isn't actually doing anything actually useful here. And it's not like he's _enjoying_ it. But all the same, it would take an earthquake to move him from this spot. To convince him to take the backs of his left-hand fingers away from those little puffs of heat or his right-hand fingertips off what _should_ be the pulse point in Jason's wrist.

Guilt isn't something Jokester has felt very often. He'd like to think that's because he doesn't do anything wrong, but he can be thoughtless, and thoughtlessness can grow cruel, no matter your intentions. And he's had those moments when you have to weigh one life against another, or run as fast as you can to save someone but it isn't quite fast enough.

Not that many. He's mad and clever and lucky. But it happens. He gets sad, when things go wrong. He apologizes, when _he's_ wrong, when he notices. Tries to make up for it. But he doesn't feel _guilty_ much at all. He isn't really set up for it. (Guilt is inconvenient, he's noticed, like fear; he doesn't know how normal people get _anything_ done if they're always fighting themselves.) But this time, he did this. He wasn't the bad guy but he was the one who _made the hard call,_ like the cops like to say, and that's not, that's not who he is, not who he ever wanted to be.

Jon is peering into Jason's chest cavity, biting his lip white. "I can't see whether he's starting to heal," he said. "There's too much blood."

"You've done everything you can, Jon," Ed says. Strawman sucks in a long breath, nods.

Looks down at the bandage on his arm, stained from the inside with his own blood and the outside with Jason's. Shudders. Germaphobia, J remembers. Not serious, but real. And he did this anyway. How did he get such awesome friends. Such brave ones.

Jon strips off the thin yellow-white gloves, looks for somewhere to throw them away, wrinkles his nose and puts them back in the zip-loc they came out of, stows it away. They've wrecked the place pretty thoroughly, but he's still not going to litter. That's Jon Crane for you. He goes off to get his mask and costume-gloves back and J forgets about him, more or less, because he's just felt a flutter against his fingertips and his other hand skates away from Jason's mouth to seek out the heavier pulse in his throat.

It's back. It's growing steady, growing stronger—

Jason draws in a larger breath, suddenly. The gap between his ribs yawns wide and the breath stutters, startled by the pain. "Hey," J says, sliding his hand back so he can squeeze Jason's. Nobody in the Court would do that. He'll know he's safe. "You're gonna be okay, Junior. Just keep breathing."

J has known his kid long enough that he almost trips over the silence where Jason should be grumbling something about the _chasm the size of Norway in his side, shut up. _"JJ?" he asks. Makes a circle on his palm with his thumb, automatic soothing.

Jason's eyes flick open. "Mission?"

Jokester recoils, just a little, because that's one of Talon's words and if they've driven him back there, then. Jason flinches. "_Did we get the thing?_" he rephrases, spending strength he doesn't have to spare, voice scraped, and J squeezes his hand in apology.

"No," he admits.

At that, Red Hood grimaces and tries to sit up, falls back with a gasp, the incision between his ribs oozing blood markedly faster. "Careful!" J exclaims belatedly. He caught Jason with his free arm, but no matter how gently he eases him back down, he can't undo whatever damage just re-happened.

Jason rolls his eyes, pulling his hand free to brace against the table, and his stomach tenses up like he's about to try again.

"Don't _move_, Hood," Strawman snaps. Picks up the gory little pellet of silver and for a second looks like a true living nightmare, brandishing it, all burlap and bloodstains and spidery, jutting limbs. "I just dug this out of your _heart._"

Jason's eyes cut away. His right hand twitches, as if remembering his mind-controlled fixation on stabbing Strawman in the throat. "Thanks," he says. "Uh, thanks everybody. Sorry about the…"

"Could have happened to any one of us," says Basil.

Jason huffs out air in a way that makes the corners of his eyes crinkle in pain, and clearly means 'but it was me.' "It's all a little blurry after he got me," he says. Moves one more time like he wants to sit up, and J lifts him before he can tear anything else open. Blurry it may be, but if he remembers being carved up like a turkey on this table at _all, _that's a great reason to want to feel less exposed. And he's conscious now, he gets to make his own decisions, even if they're stupid. Once he's sitting upright, leaning heavily on J, he looks around and asks, "What happened to Blood?"

"He teleported out," reports Ed. "With the thing we were here to intercept, of course."

"Wayne will have it by now," says Basil. He's stopped leaning on Enigma, but there are still telltale signs that he'd really be better off if he would at least sit down, if not let himself melt a little.

"But it's okay," J interjects, squeezing gently around Jason's shoulders. "It was the Scarabaeus like our contact thought, not the second Ring of Kur-Alet. It hasn't responded to anyone since Sendak died. It's just a collector's piece."

"It's the manifestation of Khepri. You _do not_ let somebody obsessed with power possess the physical form of a _god._"

Which, well. Yeah.

"Well," Enigma says, pressing at the corner of his domino mask the way he does when the spirit gum starts weakening, "Owlman's god complex aside, we should probably get out of here before something else horrible happens."

He makes a good point. They are in an evil wizard's bedroom. That is generally not a good place to be.

It's also not a good place to leave approximately a gallon of Jason's blood. For Jason-of-the-Blood to play with. Jokester's not an expert on magic, but he knows blood is serious business. Even if Owlman probably has a sample somewhere, there's no need to just leave it slathered everywhere.

"We should prob'ly mop up before we leave," he observes.

Ed opens his mouth to say something, probably sardonic, about J's sudden housekeeping urges—and okay, guilty as charged, but _he_ always knows where everything is, and if Ed just thought for a second he'd figure out why it matters now, science-brain or no—but never gets to the words because there's a sound of footsteps in the hall and the click of the heavy paneled door unlatching from the outside. Everyone tenses for a fight, even Jason who shouldn't be moving.

And the door swings open…on Heat Sink and Deep Freeze. She's sunk into the half-crouch she prefers for fighting, hands upraised, with Victor's ice-guns held outstretched, poking over her shoulders from behind.

The two hero groups hold still for a long second, threatening each other, before Ed awkwardly lowers his stick, J laughs at all of them, and Crystal straightens up, shoving back the few wild curls that have escaped from her braid and casing the room with almost professional swiftness. The blood and mess, Reformer's shakiness, the deep gouge in Jason's torso and, more unusually, his shirtlessness and position sitting on a table, with his dad helping him sit up. The complete lack of any enemies whatsoever. "Wow. What did we miss?"

"Excitement," says Jon ruefully.

"What is, five minutes of combat followed by a freestyle surgical demo," says Ed. Basil steps on his foot.

Jason snorts again, and it seems to hurt less this time. "Sorry," J tells him. Failing the 'mission objective' doesn't bother him personally so much, but he's not calling this a success until Red Hood's fully recovered. He really wishes he could have come up with some other way.

"Don't even. You saved me, _again. J_ust like you promised last time I got cut up on a table. If you let the headgame get to you, he wins. That goes for everybody," he adds, shooting a pointed look at Strawman, who did the cutting up. "I _owe you one_."

"Well said," declaims Freeze. When everyone looks at him, he shrugs, as much as his suit will allow. "I don't know what happened, but I approve of the sentiment."

* * *

_**A/N: Warning** for major surgery performed inexpertly without anaesthesia or appropriate tools. _

_I blame this chapter on my grandfather, who had open-heart surgery in 1971 and was always way too willing to discuss it with small children who should not have known what a rib-spreader was. Actually, you can probably blame a lot of this series on him; he worked as a clown in his youth. A very classy silent clown. Black triangles under his eyes. No wig. Lots of juggling. He could make the funniest faces._

_Being a villain apparently got Louis 'The Scarab' Sendak killed; the hero version survived into his eighties. The Rings of Kur-Alet were a linked pair of time-travelling devices; I don't even know how you'd go about separating the damn things, but I do know you really don't want Owlman to have both of them_.


	45. Anchorage

_**A/N: **And now for something lighter. Three things, actually. ;]_

* * *

'Insubordinate'

* * *

"Okay. You made the acrobatics check; Thibaud is fine. You _don't_ make the reflex save, the wave of lava comes up over the top of the bank, engulfing you…." Ed rolled a double handful of two dozen d6; theoretically it was possible for the lava to roll low enough not to kill the wizard in one round; it wasn't likely, but you learned not to underestimate blind chance when you worked with the Jokester. He raked his eyes over the fallen cascade of many-colored dice, calculating almost instantaneously and debiting the result from Wizling the Wizard's current health. "Aaaaand that's negative eighty-seven HP. You're dead. And obliterated."

"Drat," Jokester said, far too cheerfully.

"Alas, poor Wizling, we barely knew thee," muttered Harvey, dripping sarcasm.

J was already digging through the papers at Ed's elbow for a clean character sheet. "It's okay, everybody keep going while I roll up a new character."

The DM tapped his fingers on the tabletop, ineffectually gimlet-eyed. "You'll have to start at level one." The rest of the party was level eleven, now. A level one would be more or less useless to them.

"That's okay." J slapped the new sheet down and picked up a fresh-sharpened pencil. "I wanna be a druid!"

"We already have a druid."

"Yeah, Pam is boring; can I reroll now?"

"No."

"No?"

"That was your fifth character in nine sessions."

"But they all died for good causes!"

"And now the party is going on a quest to find someone who can do True Resurrection. You get the same character back, but they're going to have spent all your projected loot for the next few adventures paying the priest, and until then, you're our audience. So shut up."

J pouted, but deferred to Ed's authority over the game table. He kibitzed so extensively over their encounter with a pack of owlbears that he was unanimously kicked out of the room and instructed not to come back without snacks.

* * *

'Anchorage'

* * *

Harley's watch beeped as she finished tying a dressing snugly around a not-quite-infected knife wound on an old man's bicep. "—you'll be able to do it yourself, but if not, I'm sure we can find somebody in your building willing to give you a hand. Literally," she finished, making him flash his teeth—worn down from seventy years' hard use, but his own—and pat her wrist agreeably. "Just take the antibiotics every morning and evening, okay? Don't try to ration them, they don't work like that. You need a consistent amount in your bloodstream or the infection could get out of control."

Mr. White promised he understood, took up his cane in his good arm, and only once he was gone did Harley look down at her watch.

"It's that time already? Jason," she called, only a little louder, as she leaned through the curtains blocking off the back of her examination booth to where he was working with their encrypted patient records. "It's quarter after four. Be a dear?"

The line of patients out the front was longer than usual—they'd restocked all the medicines at the beginning of the week—and Harley was the only doctor on duty. Even if the masked nurse volunteers could handle the pharmacy side of things, she wasn't going to be able to duck out. Jason slid the file he'd been updating back into place and tossed a cockeyed salute in her direction.

"I will be a goddamn _moose_," he vowed, and ducked out the side door. A quick stop at home to don sandy-brown wig and brown color-contacts and give himself a constellation of freckles, and he was ready to swing by Edmund Kane Memorial Elementary.

He got there a few minutes early, and when he entered the vestibule one of the waiting moms waved. "Jake! Is Linda working late _again?_"

He shrugged, did his best grin. "Gotta put food on the table somehow, Mrs. P."

"Oh, I know, it's not her fault. She's just lucky she has you. Isn't that right, ladies?"

The other moms agreed that Harley was lucky, and they would all be so lucky to have such responsible teenage sons. Meghan Petronelli kept emphasizing her points with large, flick-laden hand gestures. She had a home manicure business and made a point of being a walking advertisement of her own product, and had offered freebies to everyone who shared her waiting-for-child-pickup slot at some point, including the dads. And Jason. (Who might have accepted for kicks except his cuticles didn't take well to being scraped back, and Mrs. P. would probably notice them creeping down his nails again with disquieting speed.)

"Can you help with the next PTA bake sale, Jake?" asked Veronica Richter. "It's so nice to have a strapping young man to move tables and things."

"Aww, you're plenty strong enough to move everything without me," Jason said, which was true, they were hardly old ladies, although at the Halloween bake sale he'd been recruited into he had apparently gotten all the lifting done markedly faster than usual. Training under Owlman, followed by a number of hasty relocations when home bases were compromised, taught you to tackle that kind of task efficiently.

He shoved his hands into his jean pockets. "You're talking about the holiday sale, right?" he asked. "I might be swamped with finals, but I'll see what I can do." And there he went again. Jokester had almost hurt himself laughing when Jason had come home the last time, trying to figure out how he'd wound up promising Jacob Woodward to volunteer at a bake sale. Apparently he was just a soft touch.

"Well, if Ellie's going to be in the class recital, you _have_ to come anyway, so you might as well come early."

"That's a weasel argument and you know it, Ronnie," said Jane Lewis, who bickered with Veronica at every opportunity. (They had known each other since high school and shared a book club. Jason did not understand how it had any other members. But then, the rest of the Circus barely noticed Pam and Ed going at each other anymore.)

They kept going, with Jason not really listening, while Mrs. P. located a new face and went over to introduce herself and find out whose class his kid was in and if the kid was new or just him and if he wanted a free manicure.

Then the doors to the cafeteria unlocked, and the ten of them fell into a messy line to check their kids out. He'd just signed out _Elaine Woodward_ when his target noticed him, and came running across the floor of the gym.

"Jayyyyyyy!" She was the only one who called him that, besides Jokester occasionally, for obvious reasons.

Ella was seven-and-a-half, and getting to be too old to throw herself into people's arms like this, but she was her parents' daughter and had no shame, so he guessed she'd keep doing it until she started knocking people over. He spun around on the catch, because it would make her giggle _and_ look less weird than taking the weight straight on, and settled her on his hip. "El, you human cannonball. Had fun at afterschool?"

"Uh-huh and we learned about _Alaska_ today, did you know the I-ditaron is a_ thousan'_ miles long, and the dogs run the whole way? And there's so many bears and moose—it's _not_ mooses no matter what Johnny Richter says, he's _wrong_—and, and—"

"You can tell me on the way home," Jason broke in, bending over to put her feet on the ground. He was ten years older than his little sister, and he'd only known her for two of them, but sometimes it felt like she'd been around forever. "Go get your backpack, okay?"

Ella nodded and scampered off to do so. The bag was, of course, bright purple, with green and yellow stars drawn on in fabric marker and one of the straps mended, where it had been torn, with paler-purple thread. It was conveniently distinctive, and Ella ran straight to it and back with hardly a pause.

"So," Jason asked, waving goodbye to a couple of the usual crowd who happened to be looking his way. "_Are_ you going to be in the school recital?"

"Everybody is! Except Sammy and Lexa and JoJo, cuz it's against their religion. I'm a snowflake!"

Which meant he was going to be at the recital. (They were going to have to find a way for J to attend, too, even though disguising him was so hard.) Which meant Jason might as well come early. And sell brownies.

* * *

'Come Back To The River'

* * *

In the early days, after they'd all come together except Jason, Harvey had been awarded the title of team geek (to Ed's and possibly Jon's or even Pam's annoyance) for entitling their vigilante circle and its network of contacts the League of the Rhine. He explained this was the name taken on by the group of knights and lords that had torn through the original robber barons along the River Rhine during the thirteenth-century interregnum of the Holy Roman Empire, which was a moderately compelling argument if you could stay awake through it.

"Of course, the reason the League got so big was that, on top of all the killing and localized abuses, the Barons were ruining the medieval trade economy for their own profit because there was no one to restrain them—"

"I'm not seeing a lot of princes and knights around," Waylon cut in, "and I'm sure as hell not in this to rescue the _economy_."

"Well, _obviously_," huffed Harvey. "Robber barons, though. That's my point."

"You _sure_ you know you're not a knight?" Pam teased.

"Our man Harvey is _totally_ a knight," laughed Jokester.

Harlequin dubbed him Sir Dent, which inspired a series of jokes about taking proper care of his armor, and that might have been the last of that, except Luthor somehow got word of it (no one ever owned up) and liked the idea of being a member of a 'League of the Rhine' so much that the name never quite disappeared.

Over the years, it became a real thing. They were still the Circus, and the guys from Central and Keystone were still the Rogues, Ra's and his people were still the Shadows, and all the individuals who slowly got folded into the network, giving and asking for support, remained themselves—kings and queens existing at only a few degrees of separation from desperadoes like Shiva and Bane. The League of the Rhine was never a formally constituted entity.

And yet all the same, when Gentleman Ghost and Ragdoll stumbled out of their surveillance/infiltration mission, one with a shredded aura and the other with generalized scorching, made it to safety, and told Lady Sonar _they're acting, it's now, call the League _before respectively flickering and passing out, there was no question about what they meant.

And as what would come to be called the Injustice War burst into motion, the members of the Society for Mutual Benefit (better known as the Injustice Society, the Injustice Syndicate, and the Axis of Awful) were surprised to discover just how much organized resistance to their rule the world had prepared.


	46. Hollow Men I: The Wind Behaves

Hollow Men I: 'The Wind Behaves'

_**A/N: **__It would seem that, requests notwithstanding, the readership for this fic is more interested in drama than fluff. That or I lost you guys by going on hiatus and coming back with vivisection, but I hope not. So, uh, warnings are at the bottom. :D  
_

* * *

-&amp;-_(a penny for the old Guy!)_

* * *

Many people thought, when they met Jonathan Crane, that he was a kind man.

They were wrong. He was shy, though less excruciatingly so as he grew up, and he was on the whole gentle, with restrained manners and most of the time (at least when he took his nose out of his books enough to pay attention), an intense humming _awareness_ of other people's intentions and expectations that allowed him to be remarkably considerate with minimal effort. He never failed to notice when a classmate or colleague was nervous, and had always been a good tutor, though he lacked the patience to be the best.

He knew all of this about himself, and he knew, also, that he was not really kind.

"No biologist working on anything with a central nervous system can _afford_ to be too nice," he'd told his lab partner third year of undergrad, near the end of the semester, when they'd gotten all the data they could from the mice they'd raised on three different types of potentially neurotoxic chemicals, and it was time to start the biopsies of their little brains.

One of their classmates had bowed out, unable to face killing something she'd seen born even if she _had_ been steadily poisoning it for months, and another had given up halfway through, his hands shaking. Jonathan looked across the lab at the second student, whose face had turned the color of cheese, and observed, "We've all got a little bit of Mengele in us."

"_Jesus fuck,_ Crane," said his lab partner, who was also his friend, and whose latex gloves were covered in mouse blood. "Don't _say_ things like that."

Jonathan usually tried not to. The only reason he hadn't been shunned as a child for all the creepy things he said was that he'd generally been too tongue-tied around other people to say _anything_, and even so he'd managed to worry his father enough to be taken to a series of child psychologists, which was actually how he had first developed an interest in neurology. At six, he had considered Doctor Bleek, who had a color-coded exploded diagram of the human brain on his office wall, to be his greatest friend, and chattered happily with the man for two hours a week, drinking up answers to all the questions his father and teachers couldn't or wouldn't take the time to deal with, even if he got up the nerve to ask them.

(Those visits stopped after Father died, and not just because of the money. Gran didn't approve of head-doctors, but she did approve of good, marketable hard-science degrees, and once he'd finished undergrad he didn't actually _need_ her approval anymore because a good bio grad student didn't pay tuition, he worked his butt off and got a _stipend _from the institution_._)

Learning to read had been like a magic spell, because it allowed him to look for the answers to questions _without having to ask anybody,_ or face the possibility of rejection. It had been a comfort, in the months after he'd gone to live with his grandmother, because reading was something both of them considered 'useful,' and that meant he could tuck himself up in the window seat and puzzle at difficult words for _hours _without having to talk, or think about anything that hurt.

And it had been like magic, too, a different kind, the warping of his world as he came to realize by reading that some of his unanswered questions had remained that way not because no one could be bothered to explain the answers to him, but because there _were no answers to be had_.

At least, no definite ones. At least, not yet. Lots of people had _come up_ with answers to a lot of them, but by the time Jonathan was eleven he had conceived a deep suspicion for all those ideas proclaimed with the greatest certainty, because certainty often seemed to be _all_ they had. Gran was entirely invested in the pseudo-Cartesian dualist perspective of her church, which was completely unsatisfying on several levels.

"Because," little Jonathan had said, "if our feelings came from the soul, then how would brain injuries and chemicals change them?"

He'd gotten two weeks of grounding for that, but it was worth it to see Gran's mouth pinch into that frustrated line she got when she didn't have a good answer.

And it was worth it to _know_ it had been worth it, that he had broken the rules and stood up for his ideas and _nothing terrible had happened_. Just two weeks of being grounded. He never even went anywhere anyway. The way Gran's nostrils flared white when she got mad stopped being _quite_ so terrifying, after that.

Jonathan was a coward. He knew it, his schoolmates knew it, his gran knew it and his father had known. _Be brave, son,_ Dad had said wearily, when Jonathan came clinging to him with another fear, another concern, with nightmares and monsters and the hundred and one things on the news that could kill you.

Hadn't Jonathan _told_ his father to drive carefully? Maybe nobody listened to a second grader telling them how to drive, maybe it wouldn't have mattered how careful Mr. Crane was being when that truck spun out on the interstate, but _hadn't he?_

Be brave, son, but he didn't know how, not when there were a million terrible things in the world and he could see the horrible ends down every path. How did you stop being afraid? He knew what fear was _for,_ as a survival mechanism, knew a little about how it worked, about adrenaline responses and biofeedback and. Philosophy, neurochemistry. He read and read. But none of that helped when his mouth went dry and his throat closed and he couldn't move.

When he tried to solve the lunch-money problem by packing himself lunches, and then by packing himself lunches no one would want to steal, asparagus and granola, and then giving up on lunch entirely as a meal.

When he wanted to go up to pretty, confident Ginger and say—something, something clever and funny and not creepy, not ask her out or anything, just…make her notice him. Make her smile. At him.

Or when there were seven of Conally's gang and one confused-looking freshman with a black eye already starting, and he couldn't make himself say anything, or walk out there, not when he knew about the knives they'd bring out if you made them really mad. (That cowardice hurt so much for so long, left him awake in bed with his stomach cramping up so many nights running that he swore to himself he'd throw himself in the way of the violent crazy people next time, just out of fear of the _guilt_. This resolution was never put to the test, and he always wondered if he could really have done it.)

The bravest Jonathan ever got was learning to argue back with Gran, and raising his hand in class. _You should apply for these scholarships,_ his AP Chem teacher said. He almost didn't, too afraid of rejection, too afraid of hoping too big. So maybe submitting all those forms was the actual bravest he ever got.

But really, he was just more scared of a future where he didn't get to go to college and learn more and get a job that was actually interesting, than he was of filling out paperwork that claimed he was worth an institution's while.

The one thing he didn't let himself be scared of was facing new ideas. No matter how strange they were or how intimidating, or how much he had to work to get enough information to decide whether a theory was good or bad; assertion or hypothesis valid or invalid.

He could face that he was a coward, and a lanky, painfully-thin coatrack of a boy and then a man, shy and plain and boring. That girls looked right through him, and he had no close friends—barely any at all, really. That his parents were dead, and had left him almost nothing in the way of legacy. He didn't have much, but he had his intellectual integrity.

His Gran had come back, before long, with answers to rebut his brain-versus-soul question, theological justifications and hair-splitting definitions that even (especially) at twelve _frustrated_ him, because science changed all the time but that was because people learned new things, and when religion adapted to science it never had to prove its own assertions and it wasn't _fair._

But she hadn't made up an answer on the spot. That was important. She'd gone, and asked her pastor, and done her reading, and _thought_ about it. Because she wasn't _lying, _not on purpose. She wanted the truth, just like he did. She just thought she already knew what it was. (And when it was that children should always mind their elders it seemed _awfully convenient for her_, but that still didn't mean she was lying. She just had _biases in her reasoning_.)

He devoured Asimov's entire canon when he was thirteen, reread _I, Robot _for all the little logic puzzles. Focused especially on the QT-1 unit that independently came to the conclusion that it was in fact the ordained prophet of a god that was actually the space station it had been built to run. In outlining the situation one of the characters explained to the other, _you can prove _anything_ by cold, logical reasoning, so long as you pick the right postulates._

And they couldn't hack the postulates. Those came from the choice to believe. They could have wiped the robotic brain, 'killed' the entity inside—maybe. Unless it caught them trying, and killed them. In the end, they left it to its religion, interpreting its god's will through the dials and gauges in the control center, and thereby fulfilling its intended function.

Jonathan didn't think that had necessarily been the right choice. If the sensors ever broke down, QT-1 would trust them over any evidence to the contrary. That could go really, really wrong. Though at least there was no one alive on the station to get hurt.

So before you chose to believe something, made it an initial postulate and founded your logic on it, you had _better make sure_ there was nothing wrong with it.

* * *

-&amp;-(_there the stone images are raised)_

* * *

_ Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means._ Kant. The categorical imperative.

There had been hundreds of doctors at Auschwitz. Some of them were prisoners, conscripted out of the work camps for their expertise and paid in relative safety for their work, for keeping their fellows alive until they were scheduled to be killed—for drawing up the weekly lists of those too sick to bother treating any longer—for _standing by, _although there was nothing they could possibly have done. But just as many of those serving there were full citizens, Army doctors, employees. Party members.

Researchers, even.

The officer in charge of overseeing all ostensibly-medical matters at Auschwitz was not the infamous Mengele. He was a kinder man, more human, less comprehensible. The sort of man whom prisoner and Nazi doctors alike begged not to transfer away trying to escape responsibility for horror, because anyone else Hitler sent would care so much less, be so much worse. Who spent genuine warmth playing with children whose death warrants he would grudgingly sign.

He hated Auschwitz, as far as anyone could tell, hated it and believed in it and meticulously kept it running. And cut the cervixes out of hundreds of women in the name of cancer research.

There were so many of them, once you started reading. Loyal citizens, with soft hearts and open hands, who in better times might have managed to be good.

But who had not been strong enough to manage it, in the times they had lived in. Not brave enough to throw everything away, to risk betraying their families to traitors' deaths and themselves either to that or to fleeing among the cutthroat desperate partisans, for the sake of other people's human rights. Not brave enough, or not certain enough, to stand against neighbors who took a positive joy in the bright future promised by _racial hygiene._ Not trusting enough to believe their friends and family would help them to subvert the law and keep the secret, or else _so_ trusting they believed it when they were told this inhumanity was the only route to survival, was necessity, was _justice_.

(Evil was, perhaps, good people listening to lies. Good people who believed that virtue was obedience. _Behold, _said the Moses of his grandmother's Bible,_ these caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass against the LORD in the matter of Peor, and there was a plague among the congregation of the LORD. Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves._

If it had been righteous even once, who was to say it could not be again, hm? _Who was to say?_)

There was controversy in the medical community, nowadays, about using Nazi data, from those evil labs. In the fifties and sixties, nobody thought twice about it. They just used it. It was just information. But now they were saying that was disrespectful to the dead.

Jonathan knew that he was a coward, and that he was not really kind. He wanted to go into medical science. What if it had been him, back then?

Mengele never paid for his wrongs. Others did, at least a little. (Mengele's commander, who did not do history the grace of being a monster, hanged himself in custody in 1945, before he could be convicted of anything.) But you cannot prosecute a whole country—a nation, perhaps, as a unit, but the last time that had been done to Germany it had had a negative impact on all the neighbors, so hesitation ensued—and so most of the Nazi doctors went home. Lived. Worked. Jonathan had read a few of their interviews.

There were some among them who did not feel guilty. Who had been at the heart of one of the modern age's most famous evils, calling themselves doctors, and felt no shame.

_If we believe that the evil man will wear horns, we will not know an evil man,_ he read. The world was not a children's cartoon. You could not rely on evil to announce itself, to intentionally draw opposition, to even know that it was wrong. You had to be able to figure it out for yourself.

Somehow. Somehow, you had to figure it out for yourself.

At seventeen, Jonathan drew his knobbly knees up under his chin in the night and envied his grandmother her certainties.

In the light of day, he fixed his mind on problems that had solutions, on the nature of fear rather than the nature of evil. Fear happened in the brain, after all. No matter how profound and world-encompassing the emotion seemed, it was reducible. It was controllable. Evil was not. Evil was a matter of philosophy, and philosophy might not be _useless_, but all by itself, detached from reality, it was just—sophistry. Not science. Not even really reason.

It was appealing to think of himself as a mind that was merely trapped in the circumstance of inhabiting a body. But the mind was the brain, which for all its uniqueness was a physical organ. And really, even the brain itself was only the central node of a network running throughout the body, a fragile messenger system of chemicals and electricity. Somehow adding up to a self.

He wanted to be a scientist. He wanted to ask questions, wanted to tease apart the brain until he had mapped out in it all the things people attributed to the heart and soul, not because they didn't matter but because they _did._ Because if something was important you should do your best to understand it.

All he had ever wanted was to understand.

* * *

-&amp;-_(crossed, with direct eyes)_

* * *

When Jonathan was twenty-seven, he achieved tenure-track at Gotham University. He was required to teach only one undergraduate lecture per semester, and take on two seminars and a trio of grad students. He still had to serve as an academic advisor, but he got a little more choice, instead of just being presented with an undifferentiated lump of incoming freshmen.

He still wasn't the best teacher, but he was a long way from the worst. He still noticed, when his students were upset. None of _his_ advisees ever got so desperate, locked into spirals in their heads, that they hurt themselves. Not that he was about to gloat about that to people whose kids _had._ Maybe he'd just been lucky, after all.

He additionally held a part-time position with Arkham Asylum, mostly serving as a consultant to other doctors on the latest neurological advances and helping with detailed specifications of the latest antipsychotics, but occasionally working with patients directly. His publications in the field of phobia treatment were well-received, and he was widely respected for his understanding of neurochemistry, especially in relation to stress conditions. And if the grant money never flowed like water, neither was it often like getting blood from a stone.

This was the life he had worked for.

This was everything he had wanted.

Jonathan Crane was content.

His Gran disapproved of half a dozen things about his way of life, but he _was_ successful and respectable, and he still came home to visit every year or two, and she still baked apple turnovers when he did. They mostly avoided topics of dissension with the ease of long practice, and if Jonathan could never be entirely relaxed around her, he didn't hate her, either. When G. Gordon Godfrey, the controversial atheist columnist, scheduled a televised debate with Ken Ham, Jonathan recklessly suggested they watch it together.

It didn't even go badly. Jonathan didn't laugh as much as he would've watching it on his own, but Gran didn't get defensive so much as disgusted with _both_ parties—Godfrey for being wrong and making tacky puns about his own name, and Ham for being stupid and having bad theology—and they shook their heads over straw-man arguments and parted without bad blood, full of turnovers and milk.

A month later, Gran died in her sleep. Jonathan found himself wishing he had been less dismissive of life after death, when talking to a woman who had been old when he was born. He made sure the service was just the way she'd wanted it—she'd written up detailed instructions in her will—and sat through her pastor's sermon thinking about comforting lies, about truth and knowledge, and the terror of uncertainty, and how rarely he had ever seen his grandmother smile.

Psychiatrists made the worst patients, but he signed up for grief counseling anyway. Caught himself taking detailed notes on his own emotional state because he hadn't been bereaved since he was six and it was very different, as an adult.

Gran would have sneered at him. He didn't resent that so much, anymore.

He'd barely seen her a dozen times since he'd finished undergrad. It was strange, how much you could miss someone who'd barely been part of your life.

* * *

-&amp;-_(between the essence and the descent)_

* * *

He was thirty-five when the fateful research proposal arrived on his desk.

It wasn't often he had research proposed _to _him, and only once had a proposal arrived like this, wrapped up with a juicy grant in a metaphorical bow. (_That_ proposal, which had been clearly based on Jonathan's published work and read like a wish list, had led to the development of an inhalable that could suppress panic attacks, allowing phobias and anxieties to be confronted and overcome at greater speed with less suffering. The underwriting corporation had tried to lure Jonathan to the University of Metropolis for the project, but he had tenure here, and for all Gotham's shortcomings it suited him better than the bright, slick young city in its gentler climate, closer to the hometown he'd been so set on escaping.)

This one, though. It was, technically, based on his research—his current track, in fact. A lot of his previous work came together in his recent interest in developing pharmaceuticals that could induce the stress states he wanted to study—partly because if the drugs worked it would prove some of his inferences, and partly because he would much rather drug a rabbit terrified than torture it that way, even if the rabbit would only perceive minimal benefit from the difference.

Jonathan read through it, then read through it again, sifting between the lines, hoping he had misunderstood. Trying to find some other word than his grandmother's to express what he'd found there.

Heresy and blasphemy were both within his purview. Code and convention were nothing before truth. But this…this was heresy against _science_, against those few things he had cobbled together to believe in, his island in the terrifying abyss, and he could not let it stand. Would have felt compelled to speak out against anyone else taking this path.

He said no. Sent the proposal back with a list of the dozen reasons those compounds were not prepared for human trials, _especially_ such intense ones, _most especially_ _not_ on anyone who was not a free volunteer. He cited the Geneva Convention, although it did not technically apply because Arkham's inmates weren't prisoners of war. They weren't even technically penal prisoners of the state, most of them; they were people committed by their families because they just weren't safe outside of an institutional setting, and people remitted by the law for the same reason, often because they were not fit to stand trial or because their trials had found them not guilty by reason of insanity.

They were, in short, while very fascinating subjects, not actually suitable for research into the normal human brain _anyway._

The proposal came back, most of the dozen reasons either ignored or dismissed. The Geneva Convention was apparently deemed irrelevant, but the revised proposal did include a measure for recruiting some subjects from Blackgate Penitentiary. For more neurotypical sample reactions.

Jonathan said no again. (If the science had been ready for this step he might have found this a little less easy, but he had a lot of refining to do before he was ready to start petitioning to work with primates, let alone humans. You couldn't rush good research. Even less could you rush _potentially evil research. _Even for the sake of not having to write your own grant proposals anymore.)

He went to his Head of Department afterward, knowing that he hadn't seen the end of the subject. She was strained and sympathetic and strangely noncommittal.

A week later, when the proposal came back, Doctor Mistlethwaite came with it, and so did a representative from Wayne Industries. The discussion was very polite and formal and academic-sounding, but the eventual message was entirely plain: Gotham U and WE were embarking on this research program, in conjunction with Arkham. With him or without him.

With him, it was strongly intimated, would be preferred, and in light of his concerns he should be _particularly_ anxious to be involved, and see that nothing went too far. That made a sort of sense, but only until Jonathan looked at it carefully, and at the flat glinting eyes of the corporate rep, and knew how little control he'd _really_ have. How little power to stop the torture.

The next few weeks were a torture in their own right, paperwork and petitions and stalling and runaround. He knew he was losing even when he started. He could have stood against Corporate America with the institution behind him, or against the academic administration if they hadn't been impelled on their course by a company that owned the state government very nearly outright.

He could denounce Gotham U's research to the community at large, but it wasn't as if they were planning to _hide_ what they were doing. Just package and present it in a way that sounded less horrifying. (And it _was_ horrifying, and it _was_ wrong, and he was determined to hold onto that initial moral conviction no matter how many people dismissed it. Even if he withered to dust inside when he caught a scornful, jaded look that reduced him to a whining toddler afraid of monsters in the closet, and it took him several seconds to remember how to speak.)

The plan had gotten past the review board, somehow. Wayne money, Jonathan was afraid.

(Jonathan was very afraid.)

_Concern for the interests of the subject must always prevail over the interests of science and society_. Declaration of Helsinki, 1975.

Arkham inmates were mentally incompetent. Their doctors were, in some cases, empowered to give consent on their behalf. This was, _technically_, permissible under the law.

Something was rotten. And beginning to reek.

(Jonathan had never liked being angry. Anger clotted in his stomach and made him feel sick, and sometimes it made his hands shake. The physiological symptoms were so like fear that the adrenaline usually drove him to be frightened, too, and he always got embarrassed with himself for being overemotional and losing control. There was nothing to be gained by getting angry.)

Jonathan had one last conversation with Doctor Mistlethwaite (or _Beth_, as most of the faculty called her in informal contexts), in which he appealed to scientific integrity and a lot of other highflown ideals and came close to raising his voice. It was no use. The trials commenced tomorrow at eleven AM. Her hands, she proclaimed, were tied.

Jonathan said he understood. Then he went back to his own office, and thought about truth, and knowledge, and success, and sacrifice. About that little bit of Mengele, and how much you could afford to feed it before it began to define you.

In the morning he, and everything they would have needed to go ahead with their testing program, were gone.

* * *

**_A/N: _**_This ends part I. It is longer than part II. Biomedical ethics has always, in my mind, been one of the conceptual cornerstones of Scarecrow's character, along with fear, religion, and the valuation of intelligence, and modern biomedical ethics were more or less built on the ashes of the Holocaust._

**_Warnings_**_ therefore are for discussion of the Holocaust and attempts to deal with the nature of evil in a societal and medical context. Mentions of Josef Mengele. Sources include but are not limited to Hannah Arendt's _Origins of Totalitarianism _and _The Banality of Evil; _Baumslang's _Medicalized Murder_; Lifton's _The Nazi Doctors. _Also for Jon being an atheist, which is hard to do in a fantasy setting like the DCU, blargh. Also, an old person dies of being old. And some scientists biopsy mouse brains in like the first scene, but with no detail whatsoever. I think that's everything. ^^;_


	47. Hollow Men II: This Is Cactus Land

Hollow Men II: 'This Is Cactus Land'

_**A/N: **Warnings again at close._

* * *

-&amp;-_(crowskin, crossed staves in a field)_

* * *

He got away clean. Taking with him one copy of everything that would have been necessary to press forward with systematically torturing prisoners with his work, and burning the rest. The problem was, his plan ended there. With getting away. He didn't actually have anywhere to _go._

If Gran had still been alive, he would probably have dragged himself to her door. In the dead of night, of course. Because that was the first place they'd look for him. Not that he was entirely clear who 'they' were, and whether he'd broken any laws—not that _not_ having broken any laws would protect him from arrest. Come on. He might be an ivory-tower academic, but even he knew. This was Gotham.

This was Gotham, which was why he should have known that maybe he should guard his tongue with strangers in bars. But he'd been hiding out in a motel growing increasingly twitchy for three days by then, trying to figure out where to go from here.

Gran would have supported him, he was pretty sure. Not about some things—he knew her iron moral code; if he'd asked her to hide him because he'd killed someone she'd have turned him over in a Metropolis second, but she'd never have turned on him just because she might get in _trouble,_ not if his cause had been righteous. She'd been a profoundly courageous woman, in her own way. Jonathan could have gone to her with this.

Depressingly enough, there was no one alive he could say that about. Most of his small number of friends would share his outrage over the abuse of scientific ethics, but he was going to be blackballed so hard for this if he was _lucky_, and even if he'd completely 100% trusted any of them to be willing to risk going down with his moral ship, did he really _want_ to inflict that on them? No. So that left him with no one to turn to, and nowhere to go. And no ideas for employment, since the pharmaceutical industry would undoubtedly hand him over to Wayne, let alone any way to keep doing what he loved best.

(He'd loved his job. He'd loved his job _so much,_ had worked so hard to be able to have exactly that job. What was he _doing?_ There had to have been some other way, some other channel he could have gone through to stop the human trials going forward. He should have thought harder, before he resorted to such drastic measures.

And at the same time, he couldn't stop the little voice at the back of his head saying that if he was _truly_ dedicated to this, he would have burned _all_ his notes, everything he'd dedicated his life to discovering. But he knew that if he did that, it would be only as his very last act before immolating _himself_. Even if most of it, his research track up until the last few years, was already documented in journals, some of it already in regular clinical use, and it wouldn't really be his _whole _self he was destroying. Even so. There were some lines that a man couldn't cross, and he had them for self-sacrifice as well as cruelty.)

He'd been lonely, and depressed, and terrified, and talking to another morose midnight drinker had been _so much _of a relief from staring into the depths of a horrible tequila (chosen in hopes that the unpleasantness of drinking it would keep him from having too much) and contemplating his life choices, and lack thereof going forward.

And he hadn't really thought about how there might be reasons other than potential Wayne Industries corporate repo men to not tell people he was a PhD/MD neurochemist with a focus in experimental pharmacology. Especially not people who _also_ knew he had no one waiting for him at home and wasn't expected back at work.

Not until he woke up with his head in a bag, lungs heavy with the scent of chloroform, hands and feet tied to a steel chair.

-&amp;-_(wind in dried grass)_

He'd broken fairly easy. He admitted it. In some ways, the bag had helped him bear up; the terror of the unknown was really no worse than the terror of the known, because after all he could frame so many possible bad ends from full knowledge but when he _didn't _know, the possibility existed of things being considerably _less_ dire than he in his ignorance assumed.

After they'd ripped it off, he had seen the absolute lack of any human sympathy in their eyes, looked down through the oncoming interview like the moves of a chess game, and known that the only two ends were his capitulation or his death. There was no possibility of rescue. Dragging his heels would just make the process of getting to one outcome or the other all the more unpleasant and scarring.

He hadn't been ready to die.

Jonathan Crane was a coward. It was nothing he hadn't known.

* * *

-&amp;-_(or rats' feet over broken glass)_

* * *

He'd never pictured a career in designer drugs.

That was the interesting thing about the stuff they had him make, though: it was all so new, so experimental, that it _wasn't actually illegal yet_, which meant less here in Gotham than in some cities, but still not nothing. They were always pushing him to put together something new, new, new, and the horrible lab they gave him didn't have much scope, but he found himself doing his best. Not too new, though. Nothing he didn't know what it did.

They were a bunch of small-timers, he realized fairly quickly. Grabbing him had been merely the latest in a string of attempts to break into the big leagues. Not that that made any difference, really. If there were any weaknesses in their system of imprisonment, he hadn't been able to find them, and as long as he was in their building it didn't matter how large or small their power was outside of it. Especially since he was a fugitive from, if not the law, at least Authority in some of its forms.

So here he was. Held captive, mixing up mind-bending poisons against his will. But mixing.

He asked himself what it had been worth, his moral high ground. If all it had gotten him was the slight salve to the conscience offered a prisoner-doctor. He still hadn't escaped Mengele's shadow completely, and now he had less freedom to act than ever. What had it been worth, if this was all.

If it had been worth losing everything for.

If it would be worth dying for.

He didn't think it would. He was _tired._ Tired of making sacrifices that no one had asked of him, that probably didn't even help anyone. His life was _all he had left._ This wasn't Nazi Germany. No one was _making_ people buy the little pills. No one was _making_ the dealers sell them. The only person being forced here was him. Surely that counted for something?

But then he found out people _were_ being forced. Not to buy, but to imbibe. By stealth, sometimes by actual force. The sedatives and hypnotics were being used for kidnappings and rapes. At least twice, the psychedelic mixture he had so carefully manipulated to be as harmless as possible had been used to make people so vulnerable they could be nudged into strolling into accidental deaths, thus avoiding any risk of a murder investigation.

And once again, he had to sit down—not in his familiar office this time, no, on a grimy folding chair in the corner of his shadowed attic workspace—and make a decision.

It was easier this time, really. He had so much less left to lose.

* * *

-&amp;-_(headpiece filled with straw)_

* * *

Seven months after his kidnapping, he was staring into a glass of liquor again. Not tequila—he was never touching tequila again; it was now a, not a friend, an _unpleasant acquaintance_ who had betrayed him.

Rum. Something he liked only slightly better.

Heavy footfalls entered the room—not the claw-clicking but otherwise near-silent tread of the metahuman who'd been introduced to him as Crocodile Dundee (which in retrospect had probably been intended as humor but he'd been _far_ too emotionally wrung-out to register the possibility and now didn't know what to call the person) but the solid step of the tall, scarred man he was pretty sure was the DA who'd been attacked with acid in court several years ago. He couldn't remember that name, either.

Whatever his name was, he was a big man and he moved like he was even bigger, and Jonathan had to fight not to cringe and curl up as he approached. Every craven, pathetic prey-creature instinct he'd developed over a childhood of bullying had reasserted itself and gained new monstrous strength over the course of his time as a mob chemist. He wanted to move so that when he got hit, it would only land somewhere unimportant like his back or his legs.

He held completely still.

The ex-lawyer came up behind his shoulder and stopped. Snorted. Reached over Jonathan's shoulder to grab his glass.

"Excuse me," Jonathan made himself say. Very levelly. Because he wasn't going to start giving in to threats that hadn't even been _voiced._ The kid who'd given up on lunch was a long time ago. "That's mine."

"And you're not a rum man," the acid-melted vigilante stated. Janus, that was what they'd called him during the raid, when Jonathan's carefully rigged explosions had been going off early and the whole crazy three-ring circus of them had burst in. "I thought so when I saw you taking the bottle, and now you've been in here most of an hour and you've drunk about two fingers." Janus knocked the rest of the little round liquor glass back, and raised his eyebrows when Jonathan twisted around to stare at him. "Am I wrong?"

"Maybe I'm just a slow drinker," Jonathan said.

He was. The _theory_ of drinking his sorrows away appealed to him, numbing away the spin of neural activity with a strong but mild depressant _just_ psychoactive enough to have a reliable effect without much longterm impact on neurotransmitter saturation or uptake, unless systematically abused over a fairly long period. Alcohol was a good, simple, _reliable_ drug. Which had its own risks, but they were ones he considered himself utterly equal to managing, and there were so few of those in the world that even the _risks_ of drinking acquired a certain reassuring quality.

In practice, the thoughts he was trying to slow tended to billow up and distract him from the self-medicating part.

"Hm," said Janus, noncommittally. "Whatever kind of drinker you are, you don't need to punish yourself with that battery acid."

Jonathan's ribs heaved with a breathy, bitter little laugh. "Believe me, if I were out to punish myself, we wouldn't be looking at a few sips of hundred-fifty proof rum."

"_Terrible_ one-fifty rum," Janus countered, but his strange unbalanced face twisted with an expression sort of like sympathy, and he held up an amber bottle. "All the same, I thought you might like some bourbon. And…some company."

There was something about the way he said it—not obviously uncomfortable, but sort of tentative, at odds with the forceful way he moved and made pronouncements, and appropriated other people's alcohol. Something that made Jonathan say, "Thank you," and reach out for the whiskey.

* * *

-&amp;-_(sunlight on a broken column)_

* * *

The scarred man's name turned out to be Harvey Dent, which was familiar once he said it, from back when he'd been a political figure and his name had come up all around the city in the course of campaign season. The crocodile meta was Waylon Jones, he reported, with a grin at the Crocodile Dundee thing that didn't seem to be at Jonathan's expense. He sketched out the rest of their group in small, fairly impersonal descriptors and names, and it took Jonathan a while (and a second filling of the clean glass Dent had brought with him; he'd kept Jonathan's original one and that was almost definitely an attempt to be belatedly polite rather than a sneaky way to drug him) to realize that this was information that counted as secret. That this vigilante conspiracy couldn't possibly be in the habit of telling just anyone what was under their masks and printed on their birth certificates.

"And what's his real name?" Jonathan asked idly, after Dent had shared his personal perspective on the Jokester. No one in Gotham _didn't_ know the mad clown by reputation already, but hearing him described from the point of view of a close friend was almost enough to get his psychiatric impulses piqued again.

"He doesn't have one." Janus had hesitated half a beat before saying it, analyzing Jonathan's posture and tone and possible reasons for asking in one quick slashing look that dismissed all pretense at idle curiosity.

"You aren't under any obligation to tell me," Jonathan said, running his forefinger along the far rim of his glass. Though he felt oddly disappointed. He had only asked one question, but of course that had been the one thing they didn't want him to know.

"He really doesn't." Dent set his glass down, _thunk_, motion firm and purposeful like almost every move he'd made since they'd met, and it was interesting from a behavioral-psych perspective that this man _wasn't_ the leader. He had a distinct air of command. And the redheaded woman and the man in the hat seemed like they would object to being told what to do, on principle. What was it about the Jokester that let him corral these people. "I'm not hiding anything," Dent said. "Nobody knows who he used to be."

Jonathan looked up, curve of glass cool but not cold against his fingers. The scarred, maskless face of the vigilante looked back at him, unruffled. He didn't know if he believed that, wondered again about the power dynamic that could let the clown keep his privacy when no one else did, but that lack of mask could not be denied. "Why _aren't_ you? Hiding anything."

"We want you to trust us," was the answer, frank and mild and completely inadequate to explain the danger he'd put himself and his allies in by betraying all their disguises. Before Jonathan could decide whether to say anything to that effect, Dent added, "We already know who you are, after all."

He felt his breath quicken, rat in a trap. He hadn't given his name. No one had asked. He still had his briefcase with all his papers. "You do?"

Dent nodded. "Doctor Jonathan Crane, who disappeared with all his research the night before human testing was supposed to start. Owlman was genuinely livid. There's been a covert manhunt. _Nobody _thought you were in town anymore."

They'd heard. Their masked enemy _was _behind Wayne's interest in his work. And, irony of ironies, he'd been thought successfully escaped. "While in reality I was locked up in some drug pushers' attic."

"At least it kept you out of sight." The remark was drier than dry, lilting with irony, but it still drove anger through Jonathan's teeth.

"It wasn't worth it," he said, hand tightening around his cup. Impulsively, he brought the glass up and swallowed everything in it in one gulp. Controlled the impulse to cough as it went down, smoother than the tequila or rum but still burning. _The mind that broods o'er guilty woes, / is like the scorpion girt by fire…_ "'So writhes the mind remorse hath riven,'" he murmured into his empty cup. "'Unfit for earth, undoomed for heaven.'"

Dent reached across his field of view to silently pour another finger of bourbon into the bottom of the glass, and it occurred to Jonathan that drink might be loosening his tongue. But what did it matter? He evidently had no secrets besides his compounds, and he wasn't likely to start explaining extremely advanced neurochemistry to the disfigured lawyer while in his cups, let alone explaining it _comprehensibly_. He just had to make sure he didn't pass out. (The idea terrified him. He wondered how long it would be before he could close his eyes without the fear of waking up somewhere, blind and bound.)

Though he would need to sleep, sooner or later. He could…put his papers under his head. With his hand over the latch.

They wanted him to trust them. Maybe he would, in time.

"I told myself," Jonathan said to the glass, "that I shouldn't feel guilty. They'd sell drugs anyway; all my participation meant was that they weren't selling unpredictable poison. And because of me they could afford not to cut the stuff with as many dangerous adulterants. That I might even be saving a few lives." The knot of emotion in his stomach was loosening as he got drunk. He might even be able to eat something and keep it down. "But I didn't really believe it."

There were probably a few Nazi scientists still alive today, _even now_, twenty years after he had first read about them, who didn't believe they had done anything wrong. Who couldn't bring themselves to live (or die) with the knowledge of their own guilt.

"Then you're one ahead of me," said Janus, and knocked back his cup once again. Set it down with a clunk, louder than the last, which made Jonathan think maybe the alcohol was affecting him enough that he was losing delicate motor control, even if otherwise he seemed fine. "I was District Attorney in this town, once upon a time. And I didn't think twice about whether I was doing right. I never had any doubts about the establishment; thought of corruption as inevitable and condoning it as the price of doing business." The deliberate power in the way he moved was becoming more threatening, as he spoke, coiling up like a compressed spring. As though maybe he was always angry, profoundly, and had woven it so deeply into himself that it was invisible until he allowed himself to concentrate on it. If he kept up like this, it seemed likely his glass would break, either from squeezing or because he'd thrown it.

Then he paused, and took a long breath, and the danger melted away. "I…changed," Dent said. "Obviously. But I had to make a tactical error that got me thrown out of that world before I could look back and realize it was wrong. I could never have been as brave as you, to pick up and walk away when nothing was hurting me, personally."

Jonathan's voice just clicked, when he tried to speak, and rather than fight with it he swirled the golden liquid in his cup until he was able to murmur, "The university isn't _that_ bad, really." But it must, he admitted, be worse than he ever thought before, for him to have been faced with the choice of taking his research and running, or being complicit with human rights violations in the morning.

He wasn't brave. Really, he wasn't. He just knew exactly what he couldn't bear.

So far as he could tell, none of the Circus had realized yet that he'd had no way out of his own explosions until they appeared. He had stood there, with his briefcase full of precious, worthless papers, and watched the fire spread around him, as though the dancing orange licking at the old Halloween decorations heaped in one corner would be able to tell him _why._

He'd always tried to do the right thing. How had it come to this.

He drank again. And the bourbon really was much less unpleasant than the rum. The sweetness had never concealed the bite. And even though he knew the rum was sweet because molasses had more sugar to begin with than corn did, not by any artifice, the whiskey seemed more honest somehow. "I just ran afoul of greater forces," he said.

Dent snorted. "Bruce Wayne isn't as great as all that."

"Not _him._ Personally. The…overarcing institutional corruption." Jonathan pursed his lips at the drink remaining in his cup. Left it there for now. He didn't like how his statement had come out, but he couldn't think of any better way to word it. It wasn't _inaccurate_ the way he'd said it, it just didn't have the right _sound_. This was why he quoted, when he could. He'd read so many evocative works, but when he tried to articulate ideas himself it always came down to clinical precision.

One of his old roommates used to tell him he had no poetry in his soul. The existence of the soul aside, he didn't think it was true, or he wouldn't enjoy other people's. It simply wasn't the way his brain processed language, that was all.

"Mmm," Dent hummed agreeably. "A pretty great force, I admit. And yet here we are."

"And yet," Jonathan murmured.

"Trying to be decent men, in an indecent time."

Jonathan thought of Eduard Wirths, too decent to turn away a Jewish patient from his home practice just because it was illegal to treat them, but Nazi enough to refuse to condemn the death camp where he oversaw mass murder. He thought about the bewildered freshman he hadn't stepped in to help, all those years ago.

He thought about the hard line of his grandmother's mouth.

(He didn't think about any of the bullies, because ever since he'd gotten far enough into analyzing several of them to realize that that was what they wanted most, to loom huge in the realities of those they trod upon, to be larger-than-life, brooded upon with helpless hate—ever since then, he'd refused to see them as individuals, reduced them to a dark and meaningless force, something to rise above.)

"'To be nobody-but-yourself,'" he quoted softly, "'in a world that is trying, night and day, to make you everybody else, means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.'"

He had nowhere to go. No more home, no more job. If he resurfaced to apply for another position, Wayne would catch up with him, either with lawsuits or assassins. He had nothing left in the world but his principles.

Jonathan finished off the burning liquid in his cup, and turned to Janus, his glass meeting the tabletop with a soft, crisp _tock._ "I'm prepared to fight. Will you help me?"

* * *

_**Warnings:** More Holocaust, and a character is kidnapped and held prisoner, and contemplates/attempts suicide._

**_A/N: _**_The scorpion bit was from a long dull poem by Lord Byron, and the last quote was e. e. cummings, in the 1958 book 'A Poet's Advice.' I've always liked Scarecrow's quoting habit.  
_


	48. Professional Collaboration

'Professional Collaboration'

_**A/N: **Hey I am back! I have resolved to be less of a perfectionist because if I put in less exacting effort then I am less sad if my favorites are not also your favorites. This approach should also help update speed, if I can stick to it. Roy mentioned in the original Outlaws chapter that he'd worked with the Talons around a dozen times in his villain career. Let's start with when he was seventeen…._

* * *

Frankly, there haven't been a lot of times Roy's job has been front man. It's happened—he's young, for the business, and he doesn't really bother to look as hard as he is, let alone try for harder, because that shit's for amateurs, so sometimes he gets sent in to play Normal High School Kid for one reason or another—but mostly, he's the guy with the silent ranged weapon and the fabulous aim.

The _other_ guy with both of those, technically: the less showy one. Oliver has a guy who serves as his body double, and walks around pretending to be him when he is physically absent; one of Roy's things is being his bow-double, and shooting things Queen wants to shoot when he can't do it personally, because he's (again) physically absent. At some point it's going to get out that there's another bowman in the Archer's command, and they won't be able to mess with law enforcement's heads by having Roy kill people with the signature black-fletched arrows when Oliver is attending a televised charity dinner. They'll have to find some new thing.

But anyway, the point is Oliver brought him on for the bow, and he kept him for the bow and because he likes the way Roy can take orders and _think_ about them, and that for the past three and a half years he's been primarily a _sniper_, and taken up positions where he could cover any teammates he's been saddled with, either with his bow or the rifles he's been learning.

But now he's been sent out with this kid. And while it's true that for about a quarter of a second when Roy first saw him there was all this disappointed incredulity that apparently the mythical Talon came in the form of a scrawny little kid with no pants, that opinion lasted exactly as long as it took for the kid to _move_, and—he stopped disbelieving damn quick. Talon's head swung around like a bloodhound catching a scent and fixed on Roy, like he might be prey, and for a second he froze, like _he_ thought he might be, too.

It was the silence, really, that made the kid so eerie. No, it was the pallor, like a corpse, like he'd never seen the sun in his life. No, it was the way he was so obviously completely aware of where every part of him was all the time, but didn't move them in relation to each other the way other people did. Normal people. Human people. People who couldn't stay totally stone-still, and who weren't prepared to move instantaneously in any direction at any second.

No, it was the way his _face_ never moved, so out of the corner of his eye Roy kept thinking the whole thing was a mask, one solid piece chin to hairline, and the black domino was just decorative overlay.

Okay, no. All of that _helped_ sell the creepiness, but really it was just that if Talon decided to kill him, Roy would die. There would be no warning until there was a knife between his ribs, and even if he managed to strike back, it wouldn't _matter._

And fuck, it was just one creepy little kid. About the age Roy had been when he first killed a man, but from what he'd heard Talon had been performing hits since he was about waist-high.

"Talon?" he said, like there was any possible doubt.

Nod, stiff and brisk, without quite enough neck bob to make Roy wonder if the assassin kid actually thinks he's a bird—a possibility that should not be ruled out, he has _seen some crazy_ since he left the reservation.

"Okay, then. They call me Arrow." At least, some of them do; he's mostly broken them of calling him 'arrow kid,' and other than that it's largely just 'Harper' and the apparently-inevitable 'Red.' And Shaw, Queen's big, bluff black lieutenant, clapped a hand on his shoulder and called him 'white boy' last month and Roy had this _gut-punch_ of homesickness that transformed itself almost instantaneously into blinding rage, and when he could think again Roy had a cracked bone in his hand, and Shaw had a dislocated jaw and a broken wrist.

He's lucky the boss likes him. "But I'm probably not shooting anybody today."

Talon ducked his chin in the world's most minimalist nod, confirming Roy's presence in a non-sniping capacity.

"You got briefed on the job already, right?"

Nod. Somewhere between the bird-thing and the minimalist version. God, if he spent too much time around this kid he could see himself building up a whole nod _glossary,_ trying to wring out a little more meaning from every nuance of gesture. He's heard of the strong silent type, but this is ridiculous.

"Okay, so. Just to review, I've got a meeting with the Don as myself. I'll give you three clicks on the comm if I see a reason to abort, but if not you come in eighteen minutes after me. As a valued ally, I'll get the Don to safety, while you do your thing. If our paths cross, I'll keep acting as a bodyguard, your job is to make it look like you're trying to take me without, y'know, actually taking me out, but I'll try to avoid that. Meanwhile, you kill everybody. Sound like the plan you got?"

Talon nods yet again. Agreeable guy. Roy checks his weapons, musses up his hair, and heads for the target's house.

Queen likes him, but Roy's still pretty new. He's not privy to the inner workings of plans like this; doesn't know why this one is so stupidly convoluted. They want to hurt Giordano, obviously, and hurt him bad, but they also want him to come out of it well-disposed toward Roy and his organization. (Unless Roy is getting set up somehow, of course.) They're not wiping out his Family, but they are wiping out his family.

Which points to this being Owlman's hit, primarily, because that's not really the Black Bow's style. If they want to send a really clear message to someone who's giving them trouble, they'll take out a loved one, sometimes. Generally from a distance, because bow-sniping is after all kind of a syndicate specialty, especially since Roy joined up.

And to send a message to _everybody else,_ they've been known to gank somebody who crossed them _and_ everybody who was in the way, or just in a certain radius. They've wiped whole families; it's happened. Collateral.

Killing everybody _but_ the one you're out to school, though—that's going past message or collateral. That's a full-on attempt to _destroy_ whoever's pissed you off, and Roy's never seen Queen feel the need to go that far, though admittedly he's only been on the payroll a few years so far. Which is why it's pretty fucking disturbing that, from what he's heard, this is for Owlman practically _standard practice._ He likes leaving lone survivors. This is the _tac nuke_ approach to assassination, and as a sniper who takes pride in his precision, Roy is slightly annoyed by the bombast of it all.

But hey. He's getting paid a seven-kill rate for a little surveillance and low-risk extraction. Not that he'd be willing to trade his normal job for 'Talon support-staff,' even with the price hike, but it's okay for today.

* * *

It's five years later, and Talon's not a kid anymore. Roy's not sure how old he _is,_ but older than Roy was when they met, anyway. He's put on several inches and filled out a lot, though he's still kind of on the skinny side. Black hair still combed back vampire-flat, face almost as creepily pale as ever, and if anything even more expressionless.

This is only the fourth time they've worked together, and the second time it threw Roy for a total loop that the creepy creature had _grown_, but he's used to it now: for all his vague inhumanity, Talon is human enough to grow up.

"What is Owlman's hard-on for leaving lone survivors?" Roy grouses now, as he, Talon, and Troia clear the devastated compound. Blaze has already jetted off to do his own thing, but flying away from the attack site would be too unsubtle, so Donna's joining Roy (and, buzzkill, Talon) in the exfil truck, before they take separate planes out of Khartoum.

Roy skirts an unstable-looking patch of floor as he grumbles, eyeing one of his arrows pinning a guard to the wall by his throat, and is busy enough wondering how likely it is to come back to bite him that, of the four of them who wiped out this guy's entire extended household for thinking he could get away with turning to some other weapons supplier, _he's_ the only one who leaves behind actual, physical calling cards, that he thinks for a second he misheard when Troia, fanning smoke gaily away from her face, laughs and says, "He's Bruce Wayne."

Then he's jerked his head around, replaying the audio and _totally sure_ he heard that right, especially because Talon's head on the _other_ side of her whipped around too, in total isolation from his shoulders. There's a wild, pointy look to his unmoving mask of a face that Roy recognizes from their last job, in Riga, when he was surrounded by seven swordsmen and every time he focused on one enough to kill him, another one would run him through.

So that would be confirmation, then.

Donna laughs again, sweeping a negligent hand at Talon's tension in the way only the nigh-indestructible superpowered can. "Don't look like that, birdboy. You know, I know, _Queen_ knows. Really don't see the risk in letting Arsenal in on it."

So then of course Talon is looking at _him_, evaluating the risk of his knowledge, and Roy has to cock one eyebrow and be absolutely unconcerned because showing weakness is basically the #1 way to be classified a liability. "Okay, yeah, who am I going to tell?" Grin for Donna, in spite of her having used his life as a gambling token in some kind of messing-with-Talon game. "Thanks for the vote of confidence, Sparkles."

She laughs at him, of course. He likes her like this, when she's in a good mood from just having proved all over again that she can take on the world—she's not actually any more stable than her adopted sister or whatever the hell they are, but she _appreciates_ her power in a way that makes it piss Roy off less.

Roy kicks absently at one of the many smoldering patches Blaze left—asshole did one of those flaming peel-outs on Oliver's new mahogany flooring one time, what the fuck kind of side power is _friction manipulation?_—because if the building burns down before the target gets home, he can't find the bodies like he's supposed to.

Bruce Wayne, he thinks. Top of Forbes', best of everything, stone-cold sonuvabitch—he and Owlman _individually_ control big sections of the world economy, legal and underground. If they're the same person, he actually comes worryingly close to straight-up _ruling the world_, though it's mostly just worrying because Oliver is playing the same game but not at the same level, and if Wayne _does_ think of the whole world as the gameboard he's playing on…well, Roy's seen what happens to lesser operations when someone really big decides to really make a play for a town. These cooperative ventures they've been doing more and more of lately, they could be opening moves toward a takeover.

So. Good to have a heads-up on that one.

But also. He's just run through the list of things everybody knows about Wayne, and landed on the only one that makes Donna's answer line up with his question.

Bruce Wayne's parents were murdered in front of him when he was a kid. Lone survivor. Serious trauma, you have to assume.

"Wow," Roy reflects out loud, as the three of them pass through the front gate of the compound, all in a row. "That's…actually kind of pathetic." He feels Talon eyeballing him again around Donna, and rolls his eyes. "Relax, I'm done. No more mocking your lord and master. And no snitching. Come on, we're all in the pot together here."

"Like lobsters," agrees Donna cheerfully. Roy would punch her, if it wouldn't just break his hand.

* * *

It's four years after that, and Garth, squire to the Crown Prince of Atlantis, recoils with a hiss from sharp claws that have raked up his arm.

It's not something the old Talon would have done. The few times Roy saw someone foolhardy or clueless enough to invade his personal space, _that_ Talon ignored it, or stuck a knife into any offending extremities. No middle ground.

"You rot-scaled bottom-feeder," the squire hisses, looming over what Roy keeps disconcertingly finding himself thinking of as 'the new kid.' "I'll—"

"Do nothing," Roy interrupts firmly. And then he's getting the glare, because he really does not have the standing to decide that. _Oliver_ would be on thin ice just declaring that, straight out, here in Atlantis. But hey. This is _definitely_ less of a faux pas than if Owlman's minion-in-chief guts Orin's. "Seriously, Garth. What were you expecting? I know you don't get a lot of experience with birds underwater, but personal space. Look it up."

He beckons impatiently at the kid in the mask, with no pants, and strides confidently off toward the banquet.

He stepped in to head that off because Atlantis tends to lump surface-dwellers together anyway, and the Black Bow is actively allied with the Court of Owls these days, so if Owlman's attack hound savaged Aqualord's lapdog, it would have spelled trouble. Protecting Garth-the-Fishy-Asshat is good politics. Protecting baby Talon, well, that would be just _crazy_. He's four and a half feet of indestructible red and black viciousness. Highly trained death-puppet, and kept on much shorter strings than the last one, too.

(There's no way he reminds Roy of himself, at all.)

* * *

Another three years, and Talon is tiny again. It's not a surprise anymore, though it weirds him out when he thinks about it—Talon is eternal, but Arsenal's been active through _three_ of them now; does that mean the Court of Owls is secretly descending into clusterfuck, or has he just been in this business _that long_?

Superstition tells him not to focus too much on how many years he's survived; his luck will run out.

Rationally, this Talon ought to be a relief. He's stable. Easy to work with. He speaks in complete sentences. He doesn't have a chip on his shoulder. He's a _fellow operative;_ apart from being half Roy's age he's basically an equal. He is so damn good at passing for nearly normal they actually dressed _him_ up as a civvie, to draw a target into position for Roy to shoot, which is definitely a disruption of the fabric of the universe right there.

But how good he is at passing for a person actually makes him _significantly fucking creepier_, because…well, it's not like Roy doesn't know from killers. He's been killing since he was a kid, himself, and it's not as big a deal as people make it out to be. But Talon has always been something special, something beyond mere murder. Roy's just a guy whose best skill happens to be shooting people, and who has the steady nerves and the lack of moral compunctions to use it regularly. Talon is…he doesn't know what. Can't put words to it, as he glances through his sights one last time at the target's cooling corpse, before he packs up his rifle and gets out. But it bothers him.

The Talon he watched grow up, the one who screwed up and disappeared, Roy understood him. Not, like, at all _intimately_, but for all his blankness, once you got used to him he was pretty straightforward. The other one, the brat Owlman doesn't want anyone to know is now a _vigilante_ of all things? Was even easier to read. If less predictable because he'd had emotions, ones that actually affected his behavior sometimes.

This one, when he has the mask and cape on, he's just as expressionless and deadly as the others. But #1 was an empty shell and #2 was, in retrospect, a broken kid, and the minute you saw them try to function outside Talon's parameters, it showed.

If this one can slide smoothly into a good little boy act and out again, and meet Roy's eyes and give a little _smirk_, and then wipe the blood off his hands and go back to being Wayne's tidy little ward—and give the kid credit, if he hadn't already known Wayne was the Owl he'd never have recognized Talon in Drake—well. He _can_ do that. All the coiled absolute menace of a Talon, but he didn't pay for it the way the others did.

Roy thinks he might be jealous.

"Arsenal," says that toneless Talon voice from behind him as he reaches ground level, and he _doesn't_ jump. Only because he's had _so much damn practice. _"Extraction point moved. This way."

"Whatever you say, kid," he grumbles.

Talon is silent.

* * *

Seven years more, and Grayson is giving him one of those crabby birdlike head tilts from the other end of the couch as he nurses a coffee. His hair is standing up on one side from bedhead and he looks like nothing so much as an extremely windblown falcon crouching over a kill. Rather than jabbing his elbows out like he's mantling his wings, though, he just looks resentful about how noisy Roy is laughing at the newspaper, and it has been somewhere between ten years and three months since mere resentment from Richard Grayson was a source of fear for the Arsenal.

He tosses the paper into Dick's lap instead, so it lands just under the coffee mug with the front page up. The story he cares about is below the fold, a third-tier story without a photo attached, and the headline reads: '_Red Hood Awarded Damages From Wayne Estate; Donates Whole Sum to Charity_.'

'First of all,' the story quotes Todd as saying, 'there is not enough money in the world, and I'm not going to let the idea that there _could be_ stand. Second, I don't deserve it if there _was_. I survived. A lot of other people didn't. And third, there are so many people who actually _need_ that kind of funding, especially now, why would anybody expect me to hold onto that blood money?'

Such a good little hero. Well. Without taking into consideration that he's _totally_ been funding his fugitive existence with grand larceny this whole time. Mostly from Wayne. How does he rank that in his little I-don't-deserve-reparations rationale?

"There's some stuff about the Civil War and some kind of Freedmen's Bureau on the other page," Roy says, when he sees that Dick's getting near the 'see A5 for more' bit at the bottom of the block of text. Greywing blinks acknowledgement, keeps reading.

"Hey, Grayson," Roy says; grins when Dick glances up at him. "Think you could get a slice of that money if you turned up and filed for reparations?"

"Before or after they clapped me in irons?" Grayson asks. But he's turning to A5, so he's not as disinterested as he's trying to act.

"It would have to be after," says Starfire in her most sensible voice. He didn't know she was listening, but the kitchen where she's been trying to find the perfect balance of spinach, kale, beet greens, beef tongue, and artichoke to make a salad that tastes like home for the past _hour_ is about five feet away. "Even on Tamaran, processing paperwork takes longer than effecting an arrest."

Roy nods and pretends to give this serious consideration. "Okay, so he goes in and files," he says, "and then as soon as he gets the money, we break in and bust him out."

Kori starts laughing into her leafy greens (and raw tongues), and Greywing deliberately folds the newspaper in half, and then into quarters, still lengthwise, and then into eighths, and leans along the length of the couch to smack Roy with it. He deflects, and Dick's bland expression pulls into a look of challenge, followed by another sally. Roy smacks his hands together in his best blade-catch, which isn't that awesome—if Dick had a real knife he'd have at least nicked a tendon, if not successfully stabbed his face.

He doesn't have a real knife, though, at least not in his hand, and Roy smirks. Grayson turns his face on enough to glare a little, which is still not enough to be scary when all he does is twist the newspaper free and scoop around to jab Roy in the ribs with it. "No," he asserts.

It actually takes Roy a second to remember what they were even talking about. "I wasn't serious. Kori, tell this undersocialized moron I wasn't serious!" He's pretty sure Grayson already knows that, or he wouldn't be menacing him with mere paper, but corroborative statements never go amiss.

"I never know whether you're joking," she replies brightly. "Human tones all sound the same to me."

"That is a damned lie. Grayson, she is lying, she knows perfectly well I was joking." He realizes that Dick has, in his usual soundless fashion, withdrawn his limbs back to his own end of the couch and is studying his nascent newspaper-shiv, as if contemplating whether it's worth the effort of opening it up again, just to get the rest of the details of what Todd had to say about his self-righteous donation practices.

He is also, expressionlessly and without making any noise, laughing at Roy.

"Oh, for…drink your coffee," he orders.

As soon as Grayson starts to do so, with a slow diffidence meant to broadcast _not because you said so,_ Roy strips off the first page of the Sports section, balls it up, and wings it at Greywing's face. It's not exactly a sniper-worthy target, but hey. They are currently engaged in the ancient art of lying low. He can do this all day. Or until he runs out of paper. Or until he is all-but-inevitably required to sample beef tongue salad. (Which Grayson may actually manage to like; he is in favor of anything that keeps his iron up, besides the obvious preventative measure of _not bleeding all over the goddamn place._)

Grayson deflects the first one, and the next two, but then Roy flicks three smaller missiles in rapid succession and their ex-Talon prioritizes not spilling his coffee over not getting hit by newspaper, and Roy pumps his fist as one of his shots glances off his teammate's face.

The exciting life of the fugitive mercenary assassin.

* * *

_**A/N: **Wally does not want to appear on camera for some reason, but at least I got Donna and Garth in. (I like Garth. I do. Evil him just strikes me as particularly nonthreatening and stoogelike, right up until he sics endless sharks upon your flesh.) All original Titans are at least established now, with our retconned-in POV guy rounding out the Founding Members bingo card. And Duela's covered, so next up is…Mal? Damn straight I need Evil Mal._

_Also, why are the Outlaws so domestic and ridiculous. Stop that, you are bad people and you should feel bad._


	49. That Baleful Star

'That Baleful Star'

_**A/N: **In which Ra's al Ghul is emphatically five hundred and seventeen, and the ficcer majored in medieval Middle Eastern history._

_(The views of the narrator are not necessarily those of the writer.)_

* * *

Ra's stopped short, in the shadowed corridor of one of his most remote compounds. Raised his eyebrows. Made a gesture to the man at his shoulder, bidding him to wait. Continued forward alone, and far more circumspectly.

As he approached his personal study, the bodies of several of his youngest warriors appeared, sprawled upon the floors, felled. Ra's did not pause. He could feel the pulse of life steady from each of them; they could wait. They would be shame-faced enough when they awoke to have been taken unawares, without his forcing them to choose between seeking out medical treatment and skulking about injured, in the absurd attempt to protect him.

Anyone who could reach this corridor without raising an alarm could easily have escaped these adolescent warriors' notice, and would have done, if secrecy had been the primary goal. Equally, anyone who had wished the youths dead had had the opportunity.

Therefore the attack, with its aftermath, was a message. Statement of presence, of power, of enmity without war or else war without enmity. Ra's knew perfectly well who the intruder must be.

Jade might sneak in, if only to test the defenses, but would never break her comrades' bones simply to make a point. Arthur would never come back at all, but if he did he would not open with violence. Nyssa would have left no sign of her presence until she dashed from the shadows to make another attempt on his life. Sandra would have made the first guard she overcame conduct her to an audience with him. Dinah would have made herself far more obvious, long before she penetrated this deeply or defeated anything like this many of his people, and at least some of them would be dead.

Onyx, too, would have made more of a mess, and discriminated between those she had liked and disliked in the days when she had been one of the League, rather than efficiently subduing each in turn in this manner.

And Bruce, brilliant Bruce, worst of all his failures, would have killed everyone he met, if he had come himself. He left Gotham rarely, after all. He would not come _here_ for anything less than utter destruction.

Especially not now that he had a trustworthy right hand to send.

Ra's turned aside from the central corridors, choosing not to enter his own study through its main door, which was placed to be visible from every point in the interior, and hung so as to murmur softly as it swung. He approached soundlessly instead, along an obscure, though not strictly _secret_, passageway, and silently slid aside a certain ordinary-looking wall panel.

Leaned on his cane in the gap, contemplating the slim figure he had discovered bent over his desk.

He who would become Ra's al Ghul had been very young, when Isma'il Shah had led his red-capped armies from the north. When that boy-king, half-worshipped by his father's army, trailing mystic prophecy, calling himself a second Alexander, had brought under his control all that land the poets called _Iran_, and portioned it out to make princes of his captains. Younger even than the new-made shahanshah, who had been barely fifteen. But he had been old enough, as kingdoms fell and power shifted, to see that the amirs might have taken power by the sword, but they held it by the pen, through the order of the tax-rolls and the promulgation of new writings, new religious teaching. Through poetry and prayer.

Five hundred years had not dissuaded him from the belief that, ink or steel, each was nothing without the other. To rely on one alone was to be destroyed. And so of course he had appreciated the utility of a desk, long before that item became the commonplace it was today.

This was much of the reason his generally ran to the style of this one: a narrow, functionally elegant roll-top furnishing that stood tucked against the far wall, and had done so for well over a century. The placement meant that he had the hidden entrance directly behind him while he worked, but Ra's was not someone who let himself be distracted by the phantom possibility of being stabbed in the back. Any assassin who could locate this compound, work their way through all the security, evade or silently overcome Ubu, and creep up on Ra's al Ghul unnoticed, in a silent room, _deserved_ their free shot at him. (And very likely didn't need it. Though, of course, it was perfectly possible to be far better at stealth than combat.)

The pale figure clad in scarlet and black was very good, but he was not _that_ good. Paper rustled faintly under his fingertips.

Ra's almost smiled. "Back again, my boy?"

Talon did not startle at the words. It was entirely possible he had felt the eyes on his back and simply declined to acknowledge them. He set aside a stack of papers—Talon was the sort of intruder who, when not being subtle, left your things better organized than he found them, due to his systematic search patterns—and glanced over his shoulder. His masked face gave very little away.

He went back to his task. "Apparently some crucial data was missing last time."

Ra's moved forward, letting the wall slide shut behind him, to trace a leisurely arc which would eventually put him at the end of a divan, in Talon's right peripheral vision. Not quite in the way of either door. Not quite _out_ of the way, either.

"Which was certainly an accident," he said, as his feet and cane fell silently on the heavy woven rugs.

The corner of Talon's mouth twitched. Anger, or amusement, or fear. His hands did not falter in their work. Perhaps the error _had_ been an accident, or perhaps the young bird had wanted an excuse to visit him. He had not _needed_ to be so blatant, after all. He was the stealthiest of Bruce's students so far.

The Demon's Head had met all three of his old pupil's Talons, over the years. They had all been impressive, measured purely by their abilities, quick and canny and strong. Worthy disciples, but Owlman treated them as—not even servants. _Tools_. Ra's had been disgusted by yet another perversion of his teachings, but had not contested it.

Had never thought, until all too recently, that they could be _saved_.

He had some excuse for not thinking it: by the time he had encountered the first of them, the child had been already a horrific automaton, barely over a meter of silent obedience that had sliced through a dozen Shadows in sprays of blood in under a minute, and stood against Ra's blade to blade for half of one. There had been no _unwillingness _there, no signaled captivity. Only blank-eyed inhumanity, and a dumb loyalty to his master that had led him to take a blade through his own heart without pause.

The second, years later, had seemed little different. Ra's had sensed the anger burning in him on both of their brief meetings, but had not realized what it meant. Not until he learned of the boy's defection to the Jokester's Circus.

It should have been Ra's' place, to offer asylum to the mistreated students of his student. He had far more security to share than did the laughing champion of Gotham and his band. He had offered that sanctuary, of course, belatedly, but did not think he had imagined the coolness with which the young man had declined. _Jason Peter Todd _did not see Ra's as very different from his old captor. After all, he had never questioned Talon's place at Owlman's side, as faithful Ubu stood by him. It had been abominable, but it had been a thing _done_; disciple claimed, weapon whetted.

But the Talons were _not_ weapons. They were children.

Always, they had been children.

The clarity of the mad clown's sight, against the blindness in his own—Ra's had felt the rebuke of it. It had made him thoughtful.

What, Ra's pondered again now as he watched Talon's search, of all that was his was genuine wisdom, and what nothing more than stale habit? It was perfectly acceptable for _others_ to be uncertain where the line fell, or to misjudge him, but _he_ must know, and know truthfully. Hundreds looked to him for guidance. Laziness in his thinking was intolerable.

The difficulty was, there was so much to sort. And much though he strove to remain ever watchful, inwardly aware and outwardly vigilant, he was set in his ways. He was…out of touch, as the expression went.

He was _old._ Not compared to, say, Vandar Adg, who had been the oldest human alive for so long that he seemed sometimes to have shed humanity like a worn-out cloak. Not _that_ old, but older than humans were meant to grow, and it…detached him, in ways that perhaps did his judgment no good. Oh, there was wisdom in distance, never doubt it, in calm detachment, but he could have turned renunciant centuries ago, if he had wished it. That was not his road.

He was Ra's al Ghul, who had taken the name of the most unfortunate of stars. And nobody alive remembered that once he had been Zuhayr ibn Daoud, a merchant's son of Isfahan. (He would have told his children, had they ever thought to ask.)

He could never turn his back upon the world.

Talon had come now to the end of the available documents, drummed a thoughtful claw against the surface of the desk, not quite hard enough to mar the finish, and reached out to twist a mechanism concealed in the decorative scrollwork, so that a small secret compartment slid open.

"Of course," Ra's said mildly, as Talon methodically disarmed the poisoned needle-trap before reaching into the hidden drawer, "I doubt your teacher will find any of what you bring him very useful." He knew exactly what information Talon had stolen from him, on every one of his incursions over the last year and a half. The first time—the first time, the boy had walked away with data on the Pit that Ra's still hated to think of in Bruce's hands, but since then, he had been careful to see that all the truly compromising documents were restricted to the locations Owlman had never known about. None of the information netted by Talon's half-dozen spy missions since had done any real harm.

Some of it had been _inconvenient_ in the extreme, requiring a great deal of work to avoid putting his operatives' lives in excess danger, but there'd been nothing ruining. It was a compromise, like so much in life—small sacrifices as bait, just enough to keep the Owl sending his fierce little chick into the depths of the League, without ever being enough to betray those in Ra's' keeping, merely for the sake of taming a young bird.

Talon had gone entirely still. Broke it, with a motion that looked—oddly like fear, though it could have been some other form of discomfort, and addressed himself to the small roll of papers extracted from the secret compartment.

"That will be inconvenient," he said mildly. "I don't suppose you could inform me which parts are misinformation."

"My dear boy," Ra's smiled. "That would be telling."

Talon glanced at him, and a thin, cold smile flickered for a moment, and was gone.

It was hard to tell whether that was a positive response to his sense of humor, or an acknowledgment of his polite refusal to further facilitate the espionage against himself, or if he was simply being mocked, but it didn't matter. It was a reaction, and that was a victory.

This Talon was his master's deadly right hand, as the others had been, dark-haired and pale-eyed (though Ra's had never seen the eyes of the first child and only assumed that they had been blue), mostly-silent and perfectly obedient. But he was unlike the others, because he was his master's heir.

Not legally—not yet—but Bruce _was_ training the boy to fill his place, holding him up in the eyes of the world as a potential successor. This was not the sixteenth century; if a man of power died without issue, chaos and disaster would not necessarily follow. But even now, a line of succession _meant_ something, and if only for the sake of securing his people's reliance on his house, establishing that impression of stability had been an intelligent move.

There had been no need, though, for the child he raised in sight of the world to also be his deadly hand in darkness. That the boy was his second in both worlds showed that even if it was not _real_, neither was it a simple pretense.

Perhaps the Owlman had at last learned that _some_ impetus other than fear was necessary, and hoped that avarice and the promise of all that was his would ensure the boy's staunch service. Perhaps he believed that it would simply be harder to give up the life of a great man's heir, than that of a simple weapon.

Or perhaps this was as close as a man like him could come to trying to build himself a family.

At least, Ra's had thought when he had realized that Bruce was, to every appearance, training the boy to succeed him in all things, his hubris did not include a certainty that he could avoid death. But, he had realized very quickly, perhaps it did, and he simply intended to be discrete about his immortality by eventually leaving his overt responsibilities in his Talon's hands, and ruling from deeper shadows.

Ra's had done as much himself more than once, after all. Much of the world at large believed him to be a mere ninety-seven, and he would need to die again soon. And yet he could not _afford_ to die. There was no one living among all his students who could take his place, could exert his delicate influence on international politics or command his respect within the underworld. If only Talia were a son, she might be equal to the role, in another ten or twenty years—but _if_ was useless. She was a daughter, and the world had not changed _that_ much.

"If you don't intend to tell me anything, why must you always speak?" Talon asked lightly, skimming a foreclaw along a line of Urdu he probably could only half-decipher.

"Perhaps I merely value your company."

"Perhaps," Talon allowed, a sardonic note in his child's voice. He photographed a document that was in fact entirely false, meant to lead Owlman down a false trail and, hopefully, into a trap.

"And the superior quality of your conversation," Ra's drawled, with the same gentle pressure that had originally pushed the boy out of monosyllables.

There was a faint gust of breath at the joke, which considering it was Talon should probably be counted as a full-blown laugh. Although it could just as easily have indicated irritation.

This third of Owlman's Talons was in many ways the most human, but he still made it very difficult to remember that he was not merely small, but fourteen. He was…old, almost, in moments. Perhaps that was what endeared him to Ra's, though perhaps it was his precision, or even the way he let a strangely childlike determination leak through his emotional barriers every so often, so that even though Ra's was not sure what the boy wanted, he knew that he wanted it very much.

His freedom, Ra's might have guessed, to judge by precedent. But on the other hand, this Talon was different from the rest. Bruce claimed this boy was a _volunteer._

A volunteer.

When Jason Todd had referred to his time under the Owl's control as _slavery_, voice thick with bile, Ra's had understood his meaning. And yet it had not resonated with him as with the other listeners—he had never in his life thought of slavery as a positive _good_, but neither had he ever counted it in the first rank of evils. Set against the butcheries of war, against casual infanticide, against good law twisted to protect the guilty; against treachery, against dire poverty, famine, and plague?

He had seen happiness in slavery. Under a good master, after all, it was little different from any other service. And the bonds of loyalty between master and servant had always seemed to him as valuable and inevitable a part of human life as the love between friends, or between parent and child, or husband and wife.

To scorn that bond now, when it grew unfashionable, would be to spit upon Ubu and all his ancestors, and their unstinting faith and strength. There was _no shame_ in fealty. Only in its abuse.

Slave-soldiers, too, had always been a class all their own. Some of the greatest armies in the world had been built that way; no one who had broken bread with proud, laughing Janissaries and lived under two separate Mamluk dynasties could ever equate the word 'slave' to abjection solely. Ra's did not have the luxury of modern man, to look back in self-congratulation on such ancestral institutions, and abhor them utterly.

Perhaps he _was_ merely out-of-touch, falling behind, but neither did he believe it to be wisdom to let his own opinions change with the changing seasons. That there were, in name, no slaves in the world anymore _was_ a fine thing, in its way, but it was only a very small victory. If only, he thought, _half_ so many people could attach such uncompromising opposition to some of those many evils that still plagued the world, and which would require them to actually _do_ something to oppose them.

The best argument for universal manumission had always been, in Ra's' view, that the only sure way to prevent _bad_ masters was to ensure there were no masters at all. You could say the same of husbands, and yet there was no great moral movement to end marriage. It was not really that he objected to flat abolition in the particular instance of human bondage, but the _precedent_ of dissolving a thing entire to erase its flaws had seemed…unwise. Look at the madness that had taken Paris in the 1790s, or at the entire last century of the Russias, or any of a hundred too-eager revolutions, and see what such catastrophically rapid change had wrought.

You could tear the world and all its structures apart down to their very foundations, and still you would not rout out the canker of injustice. That dwelt in men's hearts.

After all, as Bruce Wayne and all his kind proved, there were a thousand ways for the mighty to grind those who depended upon them into the dust, and suck their lives and dreams away. One man overtly owning another in law might make it easier, but it was hardly a unique circumstance, one utterly unlike all other stark imbalances of power. Were there not millions of women and children enslaved across the world now, sold over and over again daily until their bodies were used up, and then replaced by new victims? And so little effort put into fighting it. Strict personal honor, deeply instilled, and just law justly administered, and the sharp eyes of those who stood by ready to call trespassers against righteousness to account, had _always_ been the only true defenses of the weak. Ra's was not in favor of slavery so much as of the opinion that it was an excessively narrow definition of the problem.

Not that five hundred years of watching nations rise and fall had led him to any true solution to the inhumanity of man.

Sometimes—often—he envied the certainty of youth.

Burning down the world to purge the evil from it was a madman's solution, and a fool's, but sometimes…he felt as though his refusal to take such drastic steps had left him five hundred years useless. Just as Nyssa had said, when she turned from him. Had he made any difference at all? Had order, and structure, patient exertion of influence and spreading of what he thought was wisdom, had it all been for nothing?

It had taken time to ascertain that the mad fool fighting the Owl in Gotham was neither mad nor foolish enough to be an aspirant world-burner. Since he was not, Ra's had extended him support. Their battle was his fault, after all. By his failing, the demon who had taken so much from the clown and his comrades had gained a part of his power. Ra's had _given_ the man power, willingly. Joyfully.

By his failing…every evil in the world sometimes seemed to Ra's to be his own failing, his own weakness. The world had been his to protect for nearly five centuries, and yet look at the state of it.

If he had set himself up as a conqueror four hundred years ago, perhaps, and claimed for himself the right to declare and administer law. If he had taken a firmer stance against any of a thousand evils, and to Shaitan with the consequences. If _even now_ he were willing to resurrect the soldier he had once almost been, and turn his every resource to beating back the human tide and saving the world from his own kind, before it was too late, or….

_Then_, perhaps, he could do some more certain good than the ever-so-careful guiding hand he had kept in world affairs all this time.

In a way, Bruce was the reminder that stayed him. The most recent warning of what it was easy to become. It was one thing to contemplate throwing aside humanity as a race, as the blight on the planet that it had come to be. But _people_…you could not harm the collective without harming individuals. And individual lives…were to be protected.

The red-haired beauty whom Talia had finally managed to win away from Gotham looked at green life and at mankind, and spoke of divided loyalties. It was true: often, in this world, you could not protect everyone. Not even everyone who deserved it.

But there were some whom it was unforgivable to fail. Such as any who were bound to you, to your service and your care. Those entrusted to you.

There was an old saying, approximately as old as Ra's himself, though he had not known it in his youth, which went like this: _Master and pupil are not two._

It was true, he knew sometimes. It was the best of immortalities, he thought when watching his many protégées, when watching his brave children taking on the world. Far more worthy a thing than the mere failure to die he had clung to so long, in defiance of common sense and often his own inclinations.

Then he looked at Bruce Wayne and reconsidered, since _being alive_ meant _being able to do things_, such as amend your own damnable mistakes.

If he were to die, in truth as well as in appearance, he would be leaving his failures to his heirs, to mend his faults as they could. And that would be _appallingly _irresponsible.

Ra's had always considered himself a good judge of character. It would have cost him less to give up that fairly important part of his self-image than it cost to face the truth that, while he had been deceived by Bruce Wayne, he had _not_ been mistaken about him.

…he had seen himself in the young man. The sharpness of his mind. The rage in his heart. The indomitable iron of his will.

Perhaps the strength, he had thought, to survive the Pit.

He had seen in Bruce Wayne that youth he had once been, angry, searching. One part soldier, one part scholar, unable to choose between them, proud as any prince, and always straining, unconsciously, into the distance, to that faint echo of the song of the world that had teased at him from earliest childhood. Something had settled in him, when he had finally followed that unheard note deep into a cave along the southern rim of the Dasht-e Kavir, and first gazed into the roiling green of Life-In-Death and Death-In-Life and Life-Triumphant-In-Defiance, when he had first begun to understand his purpose. Had felt the shell that had contained and constrained him giving way, had felt that he _lived. _He had thought that he could give that to Bruce, who had reminded him so deeply of himself.

He had been deceived. Bruce had already found his purpose, even then. The concern for the world upon which the Shadows were built was nothing to him. They had merely been a tool; neither the first nor the last of the many Bruce Wayne had used and discarded in his quest for absolute control.

Ra's had been so anxious to find a suitable successor who was not someone he loved that he had closed his eyes to anything that might have suggested that his candidate was less than worthy. That was the key to using anyone—playing on their desires. Bruce had taken pains to be exactly what Ra's wanted for as long as he had a use for him, and then he had walked away.

It was petty, to wish the same betrayal on him.

Fortunately, that was not the _only_ reason Ra's had spent three years courting this boy's esteem.

Neither was it merely guilt that moved him, he was sure of that. Nor the certainty that Gotham's madman would never rescue _this_ one from what he had become. He felt a duty to the boy, certainly, and would not have invested so much effort in him if he had not, but that was not what made him so resolved.

Master and pupil were not two, but in this as in everything, Bruce had found some way to twist the spirit of the law and force it to serve him, and…perhaps Ra's was simply curious to see what part of this Talon was his master's will moving behind his eyes, and what was his own. And what he would be, without the Owl's grip wrapped around his spine. The young man Todd was so unlike the Talon he had been.

Did Bruce ever think of him, Ra's wondered, when he looked at this boy. The boy who had sought him out, to serve at his side and learn his secrets. The boy he was raising as his heir. Did he ever think of the trust Ra's had placed in him, once? Was he prepared for a viper's bite, or did he believe he had secured his weapon's loyalty?

Ra's moved a little forward, stepping away from the divan.

"Why do _you_ believe I bother with you, then?" he ventured idly, as Talon stowed the contents of the secret drawers, and considerately reset the traps.

"I wouldn't presume to guess."

"Please."

"Well," Talon said, suddenly acerbic, glancing over his shoulder at Ra's for a second before returning to his task, "I _do_ occasionally wonder if I should preemptively look up the number of some kind of 'bad touch' helpline."

Ra's could not properly appreciate this flare-up of character, because the joke did not sound quite enough like a joke.

He was a collector of people. It was a tendency that had begun long ago, for a dozen reasons, and been in constant operation for centuries. He liked to think of himself as philanthropist and patron, picking out potential gems who had no one else to help them shine. His League, his Foundation, all the other places to which he helped his various protégées find their way, could be considered merely cabinets in which he kept his collection.

The dozens and scores of them were his shield and support, a network of great practical use that also made it safe to have loved ones, because no matter who he lost—and eventually he lost everyone—he would not be alone. It let him remain tied to humanity without the constant wrack of giving too much of his heart away to those who could not help but break it, in the end.

And yes, he wanted the boy. Wanted to collect him and keep him on a metaphorical shelf close by his side—hoped, perhaps, knowing he shouldn't, that _this_ boy could be the one he needed, but even if he was not, wanted to cultivate that talent and brilliance and not let it go to _waste_ like this, doing no good to anyone, himself least of all. Wanted him away from Bruce and Gotham and his ill-use, wanted him as _his _student. He had not been subtle on that point.

Talon had no reason to trust him. He moved in a world of shadows and cruelties. And that was such a simple form of _want_. Self-explanatory. Could he be blamed, if that was how he interpreted a show of interest? As _desire?_

"Do you think that of me, boy?" Ra's asked, careful to let none of his hurt into his voice. The four seconds of silence after the remark and the slowness with which he spoke were emotion enough. It could easily have been merely a barb, light and meaningless, meant to goad him; it would be a mistake to take it too seriously.

Talon twitched a shoulder. "Of course not," he said smoothly. Straightened a stack of papers unnecessarily, and let his hands fall to his sides. He had what he had come for.

He would have to pass near Ra's to reach either exit.

"Your skills are more than reason enough to offer you membership in the League," Ra's told him. Not kindly, because the boy trusted kindness even less than he did everything else.

For the first time, Talon turned fully to face him. Expressionless again, but his unwavering gaze sent its own message. "I am loyal to my teacher."

And the remarkable and frustrating thing was, Ra's honestly could not tell if that was the truth or not.

He was certain, however, that Bruce did not deserve for it to be so.

"Loyalty is a great virtue," was all he said.

Talon quirked an eyebrow, just a little. "And were I false to him, how could you trust that to you I was true?"

Because we would earn it, Ra's did not say. Because we would be true to you, if you were one of our own, and not ask more of you than you were willing to give. Because even if you _did_ come to Bruce of your own will, even if you asked him to make you Talon, I cannot believe that what he has done to you was what you wanted.

He would not say it, because it was sentiment and foolishness, and untrue. In truth, trust in someone like this boy would be long in the building, and easily broken. _His_ trust in the League would take even longer. And very possibly, he would betray them before either bond had the chance to form.

"Nevertheless," was what Ra's said instead. "If strife ever should come between you and your teacher, I will offer you asylum. Nothing will harm you under our care."

Talon's lips twitched again, before falling back into their line, and he turned his eyes away, skating over the divan and chairs that took up the third of the room at Ra's' back. "You can't even keep me out." Something like scorn layered itself into the toneless voice.

"My boy," Ra's told him, leaning his weight more obviously on his cane and letting himself smile slightly, "I think you are overestimating how hard I try."

A waver. New tension in the shoulders, pulling back from a weak moment. A faint turn of the head, as though looking through the wall at something distant from the two of them. "You _wanted_ me to discover Talia's little secret, then?" he inquired. "Less soft than I thought you, perhaps."

Unfamiliar tension coiled in Ra's stomach, as his perception of the entire night and everything in it suddenly, vertiginously altered.

_Talon had found the nursery. _Somehow. The half-hidden suite of rooms that lay in exactly the direction he was gazing now, a direction he had never before had cause to explore. The new security measures had altered his route, or he had overheard some hint, and investigated. And now he knew. Not merely of the child's bare existence: already he resembled his father. Enough to recognize in the cradle. Talon _knew_.

…he would not have bothered to leave the guards in the corridor alive, if he had killed Ra's' grandson. That certainty enabled Ra's to keep his expression calm, to hold his position rather than attacking, or turning his back on his opponent in his haste to run to the child's side and count his every precious breath.

Ra's al Ghul was used to his family dying. The only other option had been to give up having family at all, and so he had adjusted to the certainty of loss. But that was for the aged who had had their time, or warriors daring death to take them. Not the little ones.

He had lost small children and grandchildren before. There was no grief like it.

He should have known better than to house the boy here, even for a month. This base was remote and secure and known by very few, yes, but among those few was counted _Owlman_. It was one of the staging grounds for the long game he was playing with Talon, who although he was a boy was equally an assassin. He should have _known better_.

Tension coiled in him, but he expressed none of it. His face remained blandly pleasant. The fingers on his cane did not tighten. "A handsome little secret, I am sure you agree."

Talon was, typically, expressionless. This one less so than those who had come before, but that was more because his role required that Bruce not crush all the humanity out of him, so that he could play the child plausibly for the public, rather than any personal lack of talent for concealment. In exchange for this increased emotive tendency, he was also the best at misdirection. He was, however, only fourteen.

Now, he held still, his mouth pulled together in a moment of voluntarily broadcast consideration, and flicked his eyes at Ra's behind the barely-concealing mask.

"Does he have a name?"

_Of course he has a name, _someone else might have snapped, insulted. The boy had passed his fourth birthday. Nothing human went unnamed that long. "Damianos."

"Conqueror," Talon mused. "Because naming Talia for fertility worked out so well," he added.

Ra's chuckled. He had had his own doubts about the name, considering the boy's father's obsessions, but it hadn't been his to choose. If Talia felt that a name that spoke of _taming_ and _subjugating_ was appropriate to an heir of their house—he would try not to take it as a prophecy. His daughter was, after all, stupid only in one very specific way. The name he had taken for himself centuries ago spoke of gluttony and misfortune, after all. Perhaps _Damianos_ meant only that the boy would be gentle.

"If her naming led to his birth," was all he said, "I would not change it given the chance."

Talon cocked his head, interested. "You don't want me to kill him, then?"

With age and cultivated inscrutability, it became easier and easier to convince those around you that your every action and their every reaction was part of a complex scheme into which they had fallen. Normally, it was unutterably amusing to pass his errors off as subtle manipulations.

On this occasion, it was somewhat less so.

Especially because, if you discounted that the end objective was _his grandson's death_, the boy's inference that he had been led to the information so that he would take action without Ra's being directly responsible sounded like exactly the sort of thing he _would_ do.

He shifted his grip on the handle of his cane. With most people, he would merely have looked at them in blank, implied condescension, until they came up with their own secondary explanation, but it had taken three years of careful tending to train this Talon into the idea of conversing with him as a first reaction. Too much silence risked alienating that response. "Come, now. I think more highly of your intelligence than _that_."

An almost imperceptible relaxation. "Yes," the boy agreed, and watched Ra's again, trying to divine his true purpose.

Talon thought his killing his potential rival as the Owl's heir was the _reasonable_ thing to expect of him.

He had not done it.

Most likely, because he knew that if his master ever learned what he had done, his vengeance would be terrible—and Talia would have no reason to keep it secret, with her precious child beyond all protection. Or perhaps he had hoped to barter with Ra's for the assassination, and gain some extra advantage by it besides neutralizing the competition. Perhaps he thought that a spare Wayne heir, whose existence he knew of and Bruce did not, was more likely to be useful than a threat to his position, for the moment.

Perhaps he even disliked killing children. Even mercy was far more plausible a motive than loyalty, when it came to something as threatening to his very existence as this. Ra's was certain he knew this Talon at least well enough to be sure of that.

"I could threaten you with it," Talon said at last. "Demand information without falsification, in exchange for hiding the child."

Ra's raised his eyebrows. "And am I to believe this knowledge I deny you is worth the risk of my old student learning what we keep from him?" Never mind that there was no way completing his assigned mission was worth enough to the boy to give up his leverage over the Demon's Head for it; he was probably only testing what sort of concessions that leverage could wring. Ra's was softer on this boy than he perhaps deserved, but he was not an easy mark.

Talon's lips narrowed by a hair's breadth. "I see."

Ra's wondered if he did.

His House had more to fear and less to gain than Talon did, from the Owlman learning of the hidden child. And if Talon failed to betray the secret, and his silence was discovered, the consequences…. The boy was crafty. It all depended on what he thought he stood to gain or lose.

By the gimlet look on Talon's face, he was having similar thoughts about Ra's.

"Is he a weapon against the Court?"

Ra's stood stolidly in negation. "Damianos is an heir of the House of al Ghul."

Talon's mouth twitched in more distinct scorn. It was not undeserved. The title of heir was perhaps a meaningless one, in a House in which the patriarch lived on and on, and the children died and died. Ra's two adult grandchildren lived at an intentional remove from him, Nyssa's line had been extinguished at Dachau, and the descendants of his first daughter did not even know his name.

But still Ra's named heirs, and still he searched for a true successor.

He was old. He had been old for most of his life. Even when he was freshly revitalized and did not seem past his prime to the naked eye, he was old. It was the natural order of things that he should pass away and leave the world to those who came after him.

But he had his work. He had his _duty._ And ever since the first of his sons had perished screaming, since his eldest daughter had gone into the Pit mortally wounded and emerged a clawed, hissing thing that hungered for human flesh as though his name had cursed her fate, with eyes that did not know him—so long as the life-force of the Earth continued to grant him more years, he would spend them as well as he knew how.

Amina's silence, Dusan's sorrow, Nyssa's rage, Talia's unwavering determination…each of his children had grown differently from the others, and the lessons learned from one had often been wrong for the next, but he had done his best. If his shadow stretched too far over them, well. There were worse fates.

There were so _many_ worse fates.

"After the age of four," Talon remarked—blandly, as though he thought the vase in the corner might find this information of some slight interest. "The older a child becomes, the higher its chance of dying in the attempt to become Talon."

_Aha. _This would have seemed like nonsense, if you did not know that _becoming Talon_ referred to gaining the shadow killer's signature invincibility against all wounds. A survival test that grew more difficult, the farther the tested grew from infancy. Paradox. Ra's waited.

"His chances of survival will never be better."

Ra's let his lips thin. "Damianos is an heir of the house of _al Ghul,_" he repeated. His, not Owlman's. He would not let the boy be taken. If he wished to endanger a young warrior in pursuit of greater power, there was ever and always the Pit. He might have sworn never to risk that again, but it would _still_ be better than risking one of his House to the alchemical tortures used by evil strangers, to forge weapons out of children's bones.

It was good to know, however, that Talon at least believed his master would subject his own blood heir to the process, given the chance. Bruce after all wore the armor that had been the Talon's for nearly two centuries before he claimed the place of King over the whispering Court. Ra's had always suspected that Bruce had wanted that instant regeneration very much, and wondered why the man had not claimed it. Had thought perhaps the cycle of new Talons in spite of the seeming immortality betrayed long-term complications that arose from the process.

Now he knew. Bruce had always been arrogant, but not, it seemed, enough to believe he could defeat such odds. He was—minor irony—too_ old_.

Talon had just made Ra's a gift of a secret of the Owls. Repayment for the one he had stolen, perhaps. It could of course be a falsification, like so many of the supposed facts the boy was carrying back to Gotham, but Ra's did not think so.

It would be impolitic to the point of cruelty to thank him. Talon walked very near the edge of betraying the loyalty he had avowed, with such a revelation.

…he must have been close to eleven, when he endured the process. "You had great luck to survive," Ra's observed.

"Luck?" repeated Talon. Another thin smile that seemed very nearly amused. "I suppose I did."

And that answered enough of Ra's most pressing questions about this Talon. Whatever was the truth of his loyalty, this remained: his master did not value his life, and he knew it.

Even if he _had_ begun to learn better than to destroy his acolytes in the attempt to drive the human flaws from them, Bruce would be no suitable teacher. A spying mission like this one was one thing; no twelve-year-old should be asked to serve as an assassin. Even for the best of causes, even if there were _no one_ else, it would be all but unforgiveable—and Bruce did not have the best of causes.

Even if he _had_, he would be perfectly capable of doing his own killing.

Any child deserved better than to be treated as a disposable blade.

"Timothy," Ra's said, as the boy passed him on the way to the sliding panel he had used as entrance, feeling for a moment every one of his five hundred and seventeen years. "Take care."

Talon was still for a fraction of a second, and then the old man heard the nearly-soundless puff of air that he had come to understand as faint derision for his sentimentality. Or, considering the acts of which the boy believed him capable, perhaps for his hypocrisy.

It didn't matter.

When you grew old, everything echoed. Every person walked through your heart swathed in the ghosts of those who had come and gone before them. You couldn't stop it, any more than you could stop every year from seeming shorter than the one before it, every new child from rocketing up and burning out brief and breathtaking as a firework. For a long time, he had told himself he had control of such impulses, that sentiment had no hold on his decisions.

He had learned long ago that such lies did him no service.

"Try not to let too many assassins slip past your guards," Timothy answered. And stepped into the passageway. He would doubtless exit through the first accessible window after turning right, rappel down the cliff face, and use a glider to get off the mountain in a hurry. The drafts were unpredictable, but Talon of all people could afford the risk of a crash.

Talon slipped into the shadows, going home to his master, keeping his own council, and Ra's smiled to himself, a little. Left the study through the obvious door, collecting Ubu from where he had stood patiently in the corridor; with the ease of long practice ignoring the man's dubious look that hoped he knew what he was doing. For now, it was time to see to the well-being of his unconscious students, and to his sleeping grandson.

* * *

_**A/N:** The former Shadow trainees Ra's listed are all canon; in order Cheshire, Merlyn, Nyssa Raatko (Holocaust survivor and the Jason Todd of the al Ghul family), Lady Shiva, Black Canary, and Onyx, a League rogue whom Batman endorsed but did not adopt. Ra's' 'real name' I made up, but he has to have had one because Ra's al Ghul is not a real person name, any more than Batman is. I have done my best to contextualize 'Arabian Nights ninja Dracula' into real history; a well-off member of the Arab minority in newly Safavid Persia seemed like the best match I was going to get with the data we have, and also I liked it._

_Btw, Ra's has no basis for comparison, but between his efforts, Black Adam's, and President and First Lady Wilson, the Middle East in his dimension is actually untold leagues more stable than in ours. The environmental situation is also better. The human trafficking stats are, however, taken from our world._

_Anyway, look! It's Tim and Damian! :D  
_


	50. Freebird II: With A Lullabye

'Freebird II: It All Starts With A Lullabye (Ornithology 102)'

_**A/N: **Despite what the Riddler and Burt Ward would have us believe, sparrows do not actually come in six-ounce size. It would be damned hard to find a two ounce sparrow, even. European Robins are even smaller, but the American Robin (no relation) is as I have mentioned elsewhere a big fat songbird that can weigh nearly _three_ ounces._

_Picking up immediately after Jason ran away to join the Circus. You may note that we already had a Freebird II; it is now Freebird III, which is why each chapter has a unique title in addition to any arc-designation. ^^ At some point, I will run out of 'Escapist' lyrics to turn into Talon titles. But not yet.  
_

* * *

Talon—_Jason Todd_, okay, right—had spent the first couple of hours after the warehouse fight in a state of calm that, in anyone else, Enigma would have taken for shock. On him it was basically just more Talon, except that he mustered a small smile for Harley when she approached him doing her very best _not_ to act like she was trying to tame a feral animal, and rolled his eyes at Jokester three times. Once they'd seen the Ortices off and decamped en masse to their own safehouse, he changed into the clothes they gave him—a pair of Ed's sweatpants, not quite long enough, and one of J's turtlenecks, with the sleeves rolled up—without fuss, and joined them at the kitchen table for a stilted, silent sort of three-AM-dinner.

Ella had already been put to bed by then, at a sensible hour; Pam, who'd drawn babysitting duty today, had made the most appalled face he had ever seen on her when they came in (even better than the time Ella had industriously unearthed all her root vegetables and replanted them upside down 'so the yummy part will get taller') and required extensive talking-down, and so far, Ed had noticed, no one had intimated Ella's existence in the defector's hearing. _He_ certainly wasn't about to.

He'd eaten mechanically until Harley stopped filling his plate. (Macaroni and cheese, slightly lumpy, with broccoli. The Circus tended to eat a lot of things that cooked in large batches and reheated well. Especially in peak work periods like they'd had lately.) Ed had spent most of the meal trading increasingly exaggerated speaking looks with anyone willing to exchange them—mostly Pam, though Harvey was willing to chime in with his patented longsuffering expression, and J kept intercepting his looks of bemused aggravation to offer a rebuttal of manic cheer.

And now, finally, in the hush before dawn, half-curled-up on the squishy old green sofa with its back against an internal structural wall, Talon had dropped off to sleep, and Ed had a chance to talk to J about his latest crazy idea.

He dragged the clown to the far wall of the living room, where they could keep an eye on the apparently-sleeping boy without being right on top of him. "J," he said, in an undertone. "Have you really thought about what you've brought home?" When Jokester made an exaggerated moping face at him, Edward narrowed his eyes. "This is not just another stray you've picked up! Don't look at me like you're angling for a puppy."

"I know he's not a puppy," Jokester replied, entirely too light and easy. When Ed didn't smile J added, "He's a _kid_."

"He's spent _how_ many years as Owlman's pet killer? Three. That's how many. That isn't something you just _walk off_. I don't care if he's young, he's not 'a kid.'"

"Sure he is."

"Look. I accept that he _turned on Owlman_ for whatever reason; because you promised him protection or whatever. I accept that. It annoys me, but it almost definitely happened. And I'll keep your crazy promise, because…I don't even know. But I will. And I didn't say anything when you were like _welcome to the family, _because it was not a moment for protest, and it's your family, right." Ed found himself seizing handfuls of his own hair in both hands and tugging, grinding his teeth as he did so. Now there was a habit he never liked to see coming back. He took a steadying breath. "Except I like to think I have a stake in it too, right, at this point?"

"Well duh." J actually rolled his eyes.

"_Thanks,_ I feel so loved—anyway. But have you seriously thought about what you're doing here?"

"Well, _seriously_ isn't really in my bag of tricks…"

"Don't lie to me."

"Harsh!"

"Don't even start. Have you? Is there a five-step plan? _One_ step?"

"We keep him safe."

"He's _Talon_, he doesn't need protecting!" It was a whisper-shout, and Ed was on the verge of grabbing handfuls of hair again.

"He's _not_ Talon anymore," Jokester answered, almost a snap. "Don't call him that. He told us his name. And everybody needs saving sometimes. Jason's needed it for years, and it's not his fault we were too dumb to notice."

Ed mouthed silently for a second. "Do you even…"

Jokester smiled, eyes crinkling up fondly and it was so easy to get sucked in and believe that just because he wasn't worried, there was nothing to worry about. "Eddie. Buddy. It's gonna be okay."

Ed flung up both hands and turned toward the door. "Your optimism never fails to be a pain in the ass."

"Now you're just trying to make me feel better."

"Not hardly."

"Aw, c'mon."

Edward scowled. He knew that tone, that was jolly-them-around. He would not be jollied. He had every right to be mad. Jokester would not _actually_ curl up and die if everyone didn't love him 100% at all times.

"What weighs three ounces," asked Jokester brightly, "sits in a tree, and is very dangerous?"

"A rural surveillance camera," said Edward. He was not in the mood to play, even his own game.

"No, silly. A robin with a machine gun. Though...now that I think about it, how does the bird use the machine gun? I mean, it's a simple matter of weight ratios. A three-ounce bird cannot operate a fifteen-pound assault weapon!"

He was glad he'd already turned his back, so J couldn't see him fighting down a smile. "That was _awful_. And you don't need to go looking for incredibly dangerous birds, J. You already _brought one home_."

After Enigma stalked out of the room, still muttering about _how had he let his life turn into something dictated entirely by crazy people_, Jokester turned to the green sofa against the opposite wall. (Which was not actually very far away, because it was not that big a house, and the rooms were sized to match.) "Sorry about that," he said.

Jason Todd's eyes flicked open. "For a genius," he said flatly, "he can be pretty stupid, can't he."

"Eh, he's used to people that can sleep through a hurricane. And he was whispering."

"He's right, you know." Jason still hadn't moved anything but his eyelids and his lips, and his posture curled on the couch with one cheek pillowed on his clasped hands still looked strangely vulnerable, for the blank tone of his voice. "You _shouldn't_ trust me."

"Aw, see, you and Ed agreeing about things already. You'll be best friends by the end of the month, you'll see."

Jason stared at him for a few seconds, with that blank Talon expression only slightly creased between the eyes. "I put a knife in his back last month," he pointed out. "Literally. Stabbed him in the back."

"Well, not because he'd trusted you not to," J pointed out in an utterly sensible voice.

"Anyway," Jason continued, clearly deciding that Jokester was too insane to grasp the meat of that particular point, "I don't think agreeing that you make no sense is grounds for friendship. Pretty sure lots of people loathe each other on every possible level and still agree about you."

"Yeah, but this way you two can commiserate about my nonsense. It'll be a bonding experience."

Slow blink. "Do you…annoy people into joining forces against you…often?"

"My powers of annoyance are multifaceted," Jokester confided solemnly.

And got a smile. It was a funny, flickering thing, like the reflex of amusement had swiftly been stuffed in a sack and sat upon by the counter-reflex of defensive nonexpression, and then belatedly, cautiously let out again, rather squashed.

But the fact that the reflex was a) still there and b) appearing outside its sack at all was a major victory, and Jokester beamed. Inasmuch as Jason Todd could feel safe anywhere in the world right now, he felt safe here, on Jokester's sofa.

And that was reason enough to argue with every friend he had in the world until they came around.

* * *

_**A/N: **People keep asking about the skipped parts of Jason's character arc. At this point I'm starting to figure I'll just fill it in by degrees until it's a continuous line.^^_

_There _are_ machine guns almost as light as fifteen pounds, but I'm pretty sure J's actually thinking of some kind of full-auto rifle. In the interests of total accuracy in humor. (Also, to a certain anon ending in 'feast': I appreciate your reviews a lot, they're very nice, but your handle makes them a misery to receive. This exposure therapy was quite unasked-for. I understand if you cease commenting altogether, but a change of name would be...most welcome.__)_


	51. With Tongue of Wood

'With Tongue of Wood'

_**A/N: **Title from a poem by Stephen Crane. Calvin Rose is the canon rogue Talon from the Night of Owls who was kidnapped in Dick's place. While some modern performers have changed this, traditionally flying trapeze is a partnered activity, and solo acts are performed 'swinging' or 'static'-that is, at much lower speeds._

_Warning for discussion of sleep deprivation intentionally inflicted on a minor, and resultant insomnia. Warning for a child being threatened with a weapon by a third party._

* * *

Sleep grew difficult, abruptly, after about half a year of freedom.

It hadn't been, at first. Sleep was something he needed a certain amount of to remain functional; he knew how to fit it into whatever span of time was available, and could shut himself down like the machine that Star City's red-haired Arrow had once called him, in whatever location had been designated for the purpose. In his months in the national park, sleeping had become almost a pleasurable activity, not infrequently lasting as much as four or five hours at a stretch.

The problem was, the machine that was his body was _equally_ well-trained to wake up again when danger threatened. And at some point, soon after Nolan Burton brought him the information about the Graysons, while he was deep in the midst of plans to discretely leave the continent, that part of him finally noticed that he was, in fact, in danger _all the time_ now.

Not in a way that constant wakefulness could usefully guard against—the opposite, really—but this newly resurrected _sense of self-preservation_ was not, it emerged, a rational impulse. And it had begun waking him up. Every time there was a noise. Or a draft. Or his sleeping brain _thought_ it heard something.

The vulnerability of sleep had not been a problem before. Not since quite early in his training. Talon had learned to sleep only when permissible, and Owlman very rarely took offense at his doing so, so long as he was functional as soon as he was awakened. Even when he _had_ been woken with a blow, it hadn't registered as a greater degree of helplessness than being around his king while awake, because it really wasn't. It wasn't as if Talon was allowed to _dodge_. Waking or sleeping, he had been equally defenseless, still. Fear could not have disturbed his sleep any more than the need to breathe. Fear had been his air.

But _now_ he jerked awake with his breath a little short and a weapon in his hand, over and over, certain that the Court had come for him.

Rationality slid through his fingers as sleep became more and more rare, and the…_frustration_…of having his mind betray him like this was almost worse than the feeling of unravelling inch by inch. Discipline was all he _had. _The less rest he got, the more unsettled he grew, and the harder it became to shut himself down. Soon it began to tell on his reflexes, on his ability to mimic human expressions, began to make him easier to find and easier to ambush, and he would have torn this nervousness out of himself and carved it into bloody shreds if he could.

He was _safe,_ now, in a way he had never been in the Court, where he had nevertheless been able to drop off to sleep in an instant, in almost any condition. He once used to take advantage of the minutes that badly broken legs took to mend to catch some rest, and think nothing of it. There were _beds_ now, sometimes, and rooms with locks, and perimeters rigged with traps that had himself and no other inside them. And still, the fear.

And it wasn't even that he had angered his master, and had a more terrible punishment chasing him than the retribution that had followed any mere irritation of old, bearing down on him with the weight of bitter expectation, that was disturbing his slumber. No. That was bad, but it was not what had taught him this sharp, new fear.

It was that now, he had something to lose.

He wondered if his father—that man he barely remembered, that dead face in the police record, that amber-marble laugh—had felt this way, in those weeks between the capture of the new Talon and the elimination of the ensuing complications. If he had been terrified that whatever had stolen his child would steal his wife, his life. Or if he had been too innocent to understand.

He wondered if the President who had leapt from his bed (almost) too late to save his children had been afraid. Or if he, too, had believed that he was safe.

Owlman _often_ went days at a time without resting, caught up in business or fulminating rage. But when he did, he slept hard and deep, at the heart of one of his fortresses. The sleep of the just, Grayson had heard it called. Idiots. It was the sleep of _certainty_.

He should have left North America months ago, but he had had a past to reclaim. Now, he supposed, he should consider his future, and one of its certainties was that if he wanted to survive free, he should not remain between Owlman's seat of power and that of the United States federal government. Or even on the same continent.

At least no one would be looking for June's assassin fleeing the country by cargo vessel in November.

The ship's hold was dark, and close, and cold. One moment, crouched atop shipping crates, he felt safe—it was like a gently rocking, underground rooftop; it was _homey_—and the next trapped, over and over in a sickening loop. The third time a crewman came close to discovering him, Grayson nearly killed him simply because it was something he could _do._

He held his peace. Bodies were easily disposed of at sea, but if disappearances led to a manhunt he really _would_ be trapped, here in the middle of the ocean.

The vessel brought him safely to Portugal without ever knowing about its stowaway, and Grayson disembarked. The barrier of the ocean between him and Gotham dampened the mute terror, and after a few days skulking around Portimão spying on everything he felt prepared to start impersonating a tourist, exchanging some of the money he'd brought with him and beginning to assemble a few more of the things other people considered necessities.

Young Americans were apparently not unknown for meandering their way across the face of Europe, living out of knapsacks, _by choice_. He had to stay on the move anyway, so for the moment it made an acceptable cover, though he would rather avoid notice altogether. His hair was dark and he was not too tall; once he developed a respectable tan, he might not _quite_ fit in anywhere, but he also shouldn't stick out _too_ badly anywhere except the southern three-quarters of Africa (minus South Africa itself), either.

His route would be a balance of calculated risks—in places where he did not know the language, he was more memorable, but Owlman knew what languages he spoke and might focus more attention there, and Grayson's accent was execrable _everywhere_, because he'd been made multilingual to spy and give simple commands, not to converse, let alone blend into society. Even his American English still had wrong notes, although those mostly came down to lack of intonation.

He was working on it.

He was working on all of it.

Ice cream was too sweet, but he'd learned to like popcorn again, although it was so noisy he only ate it in secure locations, where he didn't need to be alert for every sound. He liked greasy food but he had to eat it in tiny portions or he felt sick. He liked sitting still for hours, all alone, with no one to account for his time to. He liked public libraries. He liked hot showers, but they were even noisier than popcorn, so where possible he took baths instead, and took them heavily armed.

He hated dogs, and supermarkets, and the sound of children laughing. He hated shirts with tight collars. He liked wearing long pants, even in the African heat, and experienced a very minor personal crisis when he found himself torn between liking the _solidity_ of heavy boots, and being unable to abide the unnecessary weight and clumsiness of wearing them.

Eventually, in Paris, he invested in a fitted pair of light, reinforced-sole parkour boots that left him sufficient ankle flexibility, and had to grapple for the first time he could remember with the sense of being held hostage to a physical possession. That it would matter if he left his boots behind somewhere, and never went back for them.

They had been expensive, but they were not irreplaceable. It was a stupid way to feel. It was…annoying.

He decided he'd kill anyone who tried to take it from him.

He caught up with Haley's Circus in Morocco, and watched a young man named Calvin Rose leap and spin through an aerial routine that showed perfectly respectable trajectory control. Good balance.

It would have been much better with a catcher. Trapeze was _always_ better with two.

Grayson did not make himself known to any member of the circus. He did not know which of them had been in collusion with the Court all those years ago, and even had he been inclined to trust anyone, he would only have been putting them and himself at further risk.

Haley's bumbling old clown had a better routine than anything that purple-haired idiot in Gotham ever did, though. Grayson's smile, as he watched it, seemed to take less conscious control of his muscles than usual. He could almost remember the man's name. Was surprised by a memory of the thick, fruity scent he now recognized as alcohol, mingling with sawdust and the musk of great cat, as greasepaint glistened under the lights and old—good old—

No, he couldn't remember. Maybe someday.

After that, he'd made his way along the Mediterranean from Morocco to Lebanon, and from Lebanon to Greece, and then north. He thought his mother had once mentioned Tblisi, visiting it or having family there, something—there was no memory of what she'd said, or the sound of her voice, but he had the strong, foggy recollection of experimentally pronouncing the place-name, rolling the opening phonemes around on a tongue that spoke often and readily; attached to the memory was no image of Mary Grayson's face, merely the impression of her indulgent gaze.

Still, it was a memory of his mother. It was strange, to horde them now after over a decade striving to purge the attachment from his mind, but—well. All things changed.

He was changing.

It occurred to him in Berm that, even leaving aside the risk that supplying himself by theft might be leaving a trail no matter how much care he took, it was not…correct, to live that way. He had wanted to be among human beings, but even in a crowd he was isolated—his means of support was another secret to conceal, another lack of any commonality linking him to them.

(Lied to a young woman with a red leaf sewn to her knapsack, in a hostel in Lithuania: "My parents are paying for this, it's a lot cheaper than grad school, you know, hah. They say it's a good experience." The stolen syllables round and heavy in his mouth and he wanted to spit them out and say, _my parents paid for this with their lives_, except he did not know what _this_ would be, for their deaths had profited them nothing, nor him.

Another self-realization: he did not like to lie.

He still had to. So it went.)

In Romania, he put together some basic fake papers, and found a job. It was what they called under-the-table work, because his papers did not include a work visa—mostly he was responsible for loading and unloading the trucks that brought ingredients to the bakery, and carried finished products away to the several hotels and caterers that had standing orders. This kept him out of sight and kept the number of human interactions he had to juggle within a reasonable limit.

_Cornulețe_ catered extensively to the tourist trade out its storefront, however, and the owner's main reason for hiring him had been his ability to get by, albeit rather badly, in twenty languages. (The habit of perfection was strong—his first free day found him studying dictionaries for pastry-related vocabulary he had never possessed even in his native language. For the rest of his life, he would think of sweets only in Romanian.)

"It's incredible, Anghelescu," one of the apprentices told him, after a Chinese family left satisfied with plăcintă cu ciocolată and apricot gogoși, having been rescued from the bakery's signature almond croissants, which had been initially and firmly believed to be the desired 'full cake, sweet.' Sometimes rudimentary language abilities were worse than none at all.

Grayson spared the young man a dubious look as he hefted fifty-pound sacks of flour over each shoulder. Baking supplies were not terribly heavy, and he doubted his currently displayed hauling prowess was impressing someone whose arms had been built up by years of kneading. (Artisanal bread products could not, apparently, be entrusted to kneading machines.)

Dumitrescu snorted. "When the boss shoves you out there to play interpreter, you turn into this smooth, charming footman like you're waiting on royalty. I bet none of them ever guess that the rest of the time you're such a grouchy bastard."

"Not grouchy," Grayson denied. Unfriendly, possibly. Close-mouthed, yes. Twitchy, occasionally. But none of the people here had ever seen him so much as seriously annoyed.

"Well, whatever you call it. What's that about, anyway? You're just not getting paid to be nice to us?"

He didn't bother with words for that one. He was not being paid to be _outgoing _with the rest of the staff, no. Which was good, because he doubted he could have managed that, six days a week. Not for this kind of money, definitely.

"Oh, step off his neck, Dumitrescu," cut in Alina Dalca, the sole female apprentice. "Help me frost the amandine now, or stay late tonight to clean while the rest of us go home."

"You only like him cuz he's pretty," Dumitrescu grumbled, but he shrugged away from the wall to go do his job.

"Maybe I like him because he is not forever flapping his tongue," Dalca retorted. Looked up from her rows and rows of tiny sponge cakes and vat of chocolate glaze long enough to flash Grayson a smile.

"Bet none of the tourists even realize he's not Romanian, either," the other apprentice muttered, even as he took up a station and a ladle on the other side of the worktop.

Grayson deposited the flour beside the appropriate bin, into which the sacks would later be emptied, and turned to give Dumitrescu a reproachful look. He had no doubts as to his own ability to evade punishment for working illegally, but the baker could not know that, and besides, his teacher's livelihood would be in danger if it was discovered he had knowingly employed illegal foreign labor. Antonin Vasile, who owned _Cornulețe,_ was a good master, and Dumitrescu should be more careful of him.

He looked, at least, appropriately abashed.

* * *

If Daciana, one of the girls who was employed to man the sales counter during peak periods, to allow the apprentices more time to work at baking, had not fallen ill, the day might have turned out differently. For better or for worse, Grayson was not sure. But she had called in with flu-like symptoms an hour before her shift, and Grayson was abruptly, as the 'best-looking and least-essential' member of kitchen staff, thrust into full-time customer service.

It was not too bad—he was not actually required to produce much non-functional conversation, especially when there was a line of customers and he was merely responsible for entering costs, accepting payment, and making change, while Alina Dalca retrieved the desired foodstuffs from within the glass display cases.

(Excepting, of course, when his services as translator were required, but pointing sufficed in seven out of ten cases of mutual unintelligibility.)

At three-forty-seven in the afternoon, when the lunch rush had vanished and the evening one not yet begun, there were two old women carefully browsing for the perfect treat, a Turkish man earnestly discussing with Alina Dalca the ideal pastry to bring his sweetheart, and a slightly harried mother trying to be patient as her son and daughter argued about who would choose what sweet, so the other could have a bit of it. (He gathered that both of them wanted both cherry-filled gogoși and the chocolate sour-cream cake, but both of them wanted the cake _more_, and wished to be the one receiving a larger portion. Grayson thought the mother should step in and declare that each child should get half of each, or neither any, but perhaps she believed in letting them resolve such things for themselves.)

He had pulled on a clean pair of gloves and spent a few minutes peacefully transferring the fresh-baked row of little fruit tarts to fill their place at the top of the glass case nearest the cash register, alongside the frosted amacinta and other artful and hopefully tempting morsels.

The door swung open in a jingle of the little bell. Grayson glanced up, his paranoia utterly in abeyance in the face of entry being a common and desired activity—and felt ice he had not even realized was melted lock in around him again.

Four figures, masked with kerchiefs, all male, one blond, three tall; a different but overlapping three carrying firearms.

For a moment, he believed they were there for him. It was the manner of their movement—a resemblance across continents in unskilled career criminals, trying to make themselves seem larger than they were, to own the space around them with their inadequate strength. He had once worked with men such as these as his backup, subordinates—even retinue.

But the one in the lead brandished his stubby handgun and announced, _"This is a robbery. Nobody move,_" and he realized they were far less dangerous than the men he had served beside, and nothing to do with him.

Of all places to rob—a _bakery?_

Probably they believed it was a soft target.

Alina made a small, choked sound, but stood frozen with her hand on the knob that opened the chilled cabinet filled with alivenci and other custard-based dishes.

The old woman with the cane was hyperventilating. The other looked furious. The mother had fallen into a crouch, wrapping her arms around her children. The young man looked grey—in Grayson's expert opinion, there was a good chance he was about to faint. At least that would keep him from doing anything stupid, as Grayson had noticed young men were wont to do.

The threatening gestures continued to be focused in all directions, but the bulk of the robbers' attention moved now to Grayson, standing behind the counter, as expressionless and still as stone.

"You," directed the spokesman—probably leader. He stood front, and forward, with the most swagger, and swaggered harder as he moved forward, leading his group toward the cash register in a V like a flock of migrating geese. His gloves were a size too large. Dark curls just protruded from under his hat. Sloppy. "Cake-boy. If you're not too paralyzed with fear, open up that register. And start shoving the money into one of those white paper bags of yours."

Fear?

This man thought Grayson was _afraid_ of him?

He did not think he had come closer to laughing since he had been the flying child in the old newspaper.

Not the moment to indulge that impulse, however. Obediently, he moved his hand to the lever that opened the cash drawer. Pulled it.

Then, in the _ring-clack_ of the drawer sliding open, he _moved._

If this had been a deli instead of a bakery, he would have had a better selection of improvised weapons to choose from. As it was, he snatched up a full sheet of thick, chewy sugar cookies—_not_ a traditional Romanian delicacy, but very popular—and flung it corner-first into the throat of the most dangerous-looking attacker, the smallest but the only one who handled his gun like it felt natural in his hand. Not coincidentally, he was also the only one who was pointing at the floor instead of people, and it went off as he stumbled back, choking.

By then Grayson had already lunged over the cash register and grabbed the leader by the throat. He broke the man's wrist as he dragged him up over the counter, then clubbed him in the temple with the butt of his own weapon, which he let drop into the open cash drawer.

He vaulted the counter as the first body fell, slamming into the panicking blond robber before the man could decide where to direct his fire. Dodging would not have been hard, if the shot had been aimed at him, but it would be expensive to replace the glass case behind him; _Cornulețe_ would have been better off being simply robbed.

That gun, too, wound up in his hand, and he shoved it into the waistband of his pants even as he stomped the blond robber into the floor. Pulled up short of reflexively smashing the man's nose into his brain, and instead drove a heel into his abdomen, even as he spun to fling one of his hidden knives into the shoulder of the single trained gunman, who had recovered from the cookie-sheet to the larynx and begun moving toward the elderly women. This time, he dropped his weapon, as the knife sank in and the nerves in his dominant arm went dead.

Alina screamed behind the counter, and Grayson whirled again, weight on the heel in the blond man's gut, to see her smashing another tray of cookies over the head of the leader as he lurched waveringly upright beside the register—Grayson had been too gentle.

That second blow to the skull seemed to fell the moron, however, and the Turkish youth was lurching belatedly forward to try to pin him down in case he woke again, and so Grayson kicked the blond man under the chin for concussion as he continued his half-aborted lunge toward the recently disarmed gunman, who was showing remarkable fortitude by crouching to retrieve his dropped weapon in his off-hand. Grayson seized the foe by his bleeding shoulder, yielding a shout of pain, flipped him onto his back before he could reach the Glock, and struck him over the head where he lay with the first weapon to come to hand, as the frightened old woman cried out in protest against the sudden theft of her cane.

Grayson let it fall as he launched himself upright again, moving to intercept the last intruder, the one he had considered the least threat because he had no gun on him, only a knife. Which was a correct analysis, but _lesser_ was not the same as _not_, and—

—too late. He had gotten the older child, the female, by the shoulder, torn her halfway out of her mother's grasp, and was holding a long serrated blade an inch from her neck. "Get—get away!" he shouted.

A tackle would at this juncture be ineffectual. Grayson did not like to lose. Wait for the police? Too many complications. He took a step forward. "Back off!" the man shouted. "I'm warning you! I'll kill her—there are two more hostages right here!"

"You would never have the chance to lay hands on either of them," Grayson stated factually.

But that would still be a loss. If a child was murdered in the bakery, Antonin would _wish_ the robbers had been killed instead.

Grayson would also wish it.

He stepped again, to the high quaver of the child's whimpering, and the blade-edge kissed her neck—it was the jugular and larynx he held it over, however, not the more vulnerable upper point where the carotid artery lay just beneath the skin. Even with that wicked biting edge, it would take a strong hard slice to do real damage there, though the coward's shaking had already drawn two small points of blood. "Get _away_." The voice was high with terror.

"Holy _god,_ Anghelescu," murmured another voice, whose owner he did not have time to categorize.

But now Grayson was only a few feet from the man and _now_—the stolen gun he had tucked into his waistband was in his hand, leveled on the hostage-taker's forehead from barely a foot away.

Guns had been only an ancillary part of his training. But he knew every inch of one, all the same. How to locate the safety on even an unfamiliar weapon, the weight of plastic and metal, the smell of smoke and blood after a gunfight, the impact of bullets into bone.

"Will you dirty the floor with your brains?" he asked quietly.

A loud swallowing noise, _nng'gk',_ and the hand spasmed open, knife falling. The child was allowed to stumble back against her mother's breast, and the woman clutched her there, whispering prayers and dragging herself and both her offspring away along the glass.

Grayson kicked the knife back, just far enough to be out of easy lunging distance, and gestured with the gun. _Turn around._ "Hands behind your head," he added. He could have managed to convey that much in Romanian even before he ever set foot in the country, but his accent and grammar were much improved.

The last conscious robber obeyed, pressing his forehead against the glass of the bread cabinet, and now there was finally time to take in the whole of the bakery in more than just tactical flashes.

The leader was being sat upon by the young Turk. The old ladies and the young family had drawn together into a knot; the little boy was picking up the discarded cane for its owner. The blond lay still, but breathed; he could not see whether the man he had bludgeoned with the cane was still alive, but he probably was. Alina was still clutching the weaponized baking sheet; over her shoulder the other apprentices were clustered at the kitchen door, gawking. Dumitrescu was at the front, framed in the doorway. He had been the one to call Grayson by his assumed name.

As he looked toward her, Alina Dalca managed to relax her hold on her improvised weapon. "Has anyone called the police," she asked.

"I was just—yeah, hang on—" said someone in the kitchen.

"Wait," Grayson said. There was a flutter of whispers, but they seemed to comply. The police had probably been summoned anyway—there had been a gunshot at the start of the engagement. Over forty seconds ago, now. He would have to act quickly. "You," he said, singling out the old woman who had not ceased to look furious throughout the entire incident. "Take this. Cover him." It didn't matter if she had any actual experience with firearms, the point was to put the threat in the hand of someone who might plausibly fire it.

She approached, but too slowly, so he met her, handed over the pistol grip-first, and headed behind the counter. The kitchen staff parted before him the way crowds had parted all his life—not every crowd, but almost all of those who had known him for what he was.

They knew, now.

One or two trailed after him as he ducked into the cubbyhole of an office which tended to contain Antonin Vasile, when he was not baking. He was away today, negotiating with a catering company, and there was a murmur of protest as Grayson sat down in front of the small installation that allowed for monitoring the security cameras, and set the machines to erase the present tape, which had recorded his fight. No one actually attempted to stop him.

The system was very rudimentary, and Antonin used the same week's worth of tapes repeatedly rather than stockpiling such dull and unimportant footage. He dug out the tapes made so far this week, and set to erasing them as well. He wanted no record of his face associated with the inevitable rumor. Someone entered the room behind him—by the tread, Alina Dalca. Nothing hostile in her body language.

"The police will be here soon," she said.

He knew that.

"What should we tell them?"

He took his eyes from his work for a moment to confirm he had not misheard her. No. Her face said that she was waiting for the answer to a question.

_Tell them nothing. Tell them the precise truth; you have neither the time nor the authority to orchestrate a proper lie before they arrive._ "Whatever you like," he said. Finished erasing all the available footage—he was sure it would be an inconvenience to Antonin, but he needed it done. With this, even the CIA might identify him, depending on how good President Wilson's descriptions were and the skills of their analysts. Never mind the Court of Owls.

"You saved us," she said. "We should help you, so…"

He took the photocopy of his false ID from his employee file, since it also had his face, and stood. "Not really," he said.

Overall, he was embarrassed by his own reactions today. What should have been an unspeakably easy fight had been transformed by a concern for collateral—and by a subconscious realization that killing would worsen the overall results—into a real, if brief, challenge.

And now that his battle-focus had faded, he realized that simply allowing the robbery would have been best from every perspective: it would have minimized risk and alarm to all parties, and cost only a single day's profits. And he could have kept his job. But his training had not acknowledged such a possibility. Victory was all. Surrender was permissible only when confronted by those in authority, toward whom it was mandatory. These robbers had been interlopers, and weaklings, at that. He had moved without hesitation to discipline them. For moving in on _his_ territory.

It was not his, however. He had only been sheltering here. He walked past Alina Dalca back into the kitchen, made for the back door he had used in his loading and unloading work. The kitchen staff again made way. Some looked frightened but most, he realized suddenly, did not.

He turned to Dalca, who had followed him.

"Tell Antonin," he said, and then couldn't think of a message. Thanks might be appropriate—the man had been kind, even if he had been taking advantage of Grayson in his own small way. Apologies might, too, but he refused those. "Goodbye," he settled on, which was a stupid message, but it was not one he'd ever had reason to leave before. That was something. Another first.

Alina smiled, though it was not very well done. Not up to her usual standards of performance. "I will."

Peremptory and diffident at once: "Wait."

It was Dumitrescu. He was holding a bulging white bakery bag, the largest size they had, and for a grey sliding moment Grayson thought he had been conflated with the robbers, and was being offered their intended loot as some kind of protection money.

Then he recognized the shapes of gogoși and cornulețe pressing against white paper, and realized that the man had loaded up a sack of pastries.

"It's not like you're going to be sticking around to get your last paycheck, right?" Dumitrescu asked roughly. "Might as well—have these for the road."

A few of the other apprentices nodded, and Grayson stepped carefully a little way from his escape route to accept the gift. Slunk back, and hesitated a moment, feeling he should probably say _something_ else before going, knowing he could afford to waste no more time.

Alina Dalca gave a little wave. "Good luck, Anghelescu."

He wanted, for a moment, to say his true name. What had he reclaimed it for, if not to be called by it?

But it was enough to have it in his own thoughts, and he could not afford to leave such clear confirmation of his identity for Owlman to find. He inclined his head in salute, and was gone.

Amandine glaze was melting on Grayson's tongue when he crossed the Russian border two days later. Every bite tasted like the wind calling him by name.

* * *

_**A/N: **And somehow I wrote three thousand words set in a Romanian bakery. XD What? I had to stop halfway through to make cherry jam-rolls, because I'd given myself cravings. ^^ Bucharest purportedly has a thriving tourism industry._

_'Cornulețe' is the Romanian for croissant, though of course it's 'little horn' rather than 'crescent.' The legend goes that the things were invented to celebrate the Siege of Vienna ending in the retreat of the Ottomans, so I figure Eastern Europe gets naming dibs over France anyhow. Anghelescu is 'Angelson'; Griescu is a real Romanian surname but Dick is trying to be sneaky, and Bruce knows his name._

_(Posting today because it's ready, goshdarnit, stop rewriting the damn thing, and also because I have a scary medical procedure scheduled and want some good news to cheer me up afterward. x_x)_


	52. The Rubicon Delta

'The Rubicon Delta'

_**A/N: **Back after five days to thank __all of you who helped me on Tuesday! Lovely news is I do __**not**__ in fact have cancer! XD Between the wait for my heart-condition prognosis spawning Roofs and my ridiculous spew of updates during the waiting periods on this biopsy, it would appear medical crises are good for my fanfic production. And thus far my odds of survival keep turning out well, so.  
_

* * *

Slade hated politics. Almost as much as he hated politicians. Even more than he hated winning an unfair fight.

So, naturally, he had come home from the war and run for office.

Addie, in her sharp-tongued way, had thought it made perfect sense: 'You hate them because they have power over things that actually matter, and almost none of them is capable of using it for anything worthwhile. You're stubborn and opinionated, and never met a fight you were willing to run from. Go for it, jerk, I'll watch your six.'

But it was actually sheer lunacy, and his wife only thought his decisions made sense because she was even crazier than he was.

She wasn't speaking to him, right now, but he was mostly sure they'd work things out. Maybe after the funeral. She'd taken charge of planning it, as much as she could while sitting by Joey's bed in the secure ward, bristling with weapons. Mostly, she was issuing commands via email. Slade could not think of anything he wanted to do _less_ than attend Grant's funeral, except miss it. So he'd be going. And then Adeline would probably talk to him again. She knew this was almost as much her fault as his.

It was strangely distant, the question of whether she would forgive him or not. Maybe after Joey recovered, he would actually care.

He leaned both hands against the rim of the sink, to keep himself from rubbing his face again when it had done nothing to dispel the exhaustion the last two times. Leaned in close to the mirror, staring himself in the eye, and in the socket.

Before today—well, two days ago, by now, but to him it had been one long, disgusting day, like the blackest moments of every campaign he had ever fought rolled up together—the pit he usually concealed under a patch had been his greatest loss, and he had been able to go mostly without mourning it. It had been lost in a good cause, and he had _won,_ even if it was an abomination that he had needed to _fight_ to stop his own men from committing war crimes.

He'd half expected a court-martial once he survived, because he'd countermanded the implicit orders of higher-ranking men and he'd already had a reputation for insubordination, but the facts and string-pulling had been laid out in his favor while he lay in medical, and he'd wound up with another purple heart and an offer of honorable discharge.

He'd stayed in the service another five years, because it had been all he knew, and it had been Addie, who'd taught him to _be_ a soldier, who'd asked him to learn to stop. For the boys' sake. He hadn't regretted it, not really, politics and all, until now. But God, he missed it, even the things he'd hated at the time. He missed Bill, who was fifteen years his senior and still fighting strong, who at least would probably turn up as soon as he heard and could get some leave from his own government. (He hadn't called yet, so he was on assignment somewhere off the grid. When you were President, your personal fuck-ups and tragedies were front-page news worldwide.)

Slade's grip on the sink tightened, as he glared into his own eye and let the absence of the other pound. If he'd still been field-ready, maybe he could have saved both boys, or at least saved Joey his injury. If he'd been content with a quiet retirement, nobody would have had any reason to try to hurt them. If he'd done a better job of eliminating all potential threats, or securing the White House, or…it wasn't partly Adeline's fault. It wasn't mostly anyone's fault but his. And _theirs._

Ceramic cracked under his hand, and he let go. Stared at the damaged edge of the basin. This was a semi-public West Wing bathroom, ducked into on his way between meetings, and though the guard outside was maintaining his privacy, someone was going to have to fix this.

Brooding did nothing. His _feelings_ did nothing. They were meaningless without action.

Slade splashed some water over his face, smoothed back his hair, resettled his eye patch, brushed his hands over his concealed weapons, and strode out into the hall, where the head of the CBI was, as he'd expected, waiting for him. The Secret Service trailing a man everywhere made subtlety a lost cause, even when privacy was managed. "Faraday," he nodded, resuming his stride toward the meeting for which he was only slightly late. "Tell me what you've got."

The usually-imperturbable spymaster's lips thinned, as he fell in beside Slade, flanked by the useless quartet of bodyguards. Faraday was overseeing the entire network of task forces devoted to investigating the assassination, and probably hadn't slept any more than Slade had in the last thirty hours. "Not enough. Nothing to link him to any known group. We've received suggestions that he might be several urban legends, including Spring-Heeled Jack, _el Cucuy_, der Schwarze Mann, Talon of the Court of Owls, something called a Candlejack…a crack team are pursuing possible connections to the Metropolis Ultraman on the basis of the red cape…."

"It won't be him," Slade cut in. "Ultraman is obsessed with shows of force, and having his power acknowledged. If he had targeted my children, there would have been no sneaking about it."

He had been able to injure the assassin, after all. Whatever he had been, and even if the Ultraman _had _sent him, he wasn't that. There was also the fact Alexander Luthor had installed an anti-Kryptonian defense system on the White House grounds years ago, that should have engaged if Ultraman or any other member of his species approached. (Slade believed in it because the versions on Luthor's own homes and places of business saw regular use.) It was one of the few security installations _not_ receiving a complete overhaul after the fiasco.

Faraday was noncommittal. "That _could_ be what he wants you to think."

"Mm," Slade acknowledged. Well, they had the resources to devote. "Leave the team on it for now. Who's pursuing those other suggestions?"

"The…ones that don't exist, sir?" Faraday pretty much only called him _sir_ when he meant _dumbass_; Slade knew that even without Adeline telling him. But the thing about subtle criticism was that you were free to ignore it.

"Yes, those. Don't eliminate anything as impossible until you've examined it thoroughly. I recall some loud insistence on the existence of the Court of Owls a few years ago."

"From the clinically insane leader of an anarchist cell. Yes. In fact, his is the most detailed communication we've gotten on that suggestion."

"Luthor seems to think the clown is misunderstood."

"With respect, Mr. President, Luthor's politics are…questionable, at best."

"You mean he's only a Democrat because it's not good business to be a socialist," said Slade dryly.

"Sounds about right."

"The Cold War is over, Kay."

It had been over for a decade. Observing that the Cold War was over and no one in power seemed able to adapt to that fact had been half of what propelled him into politics; they say old generals are always trying to fight the last war over again.

"Yes, sir."

"But a terrorist is a terrorist." And a lead was a lead, no matter how stupid. "Put a team on the bogeyman legends," he decided.

"Yes, sir."

Slade smirked at the flat irony in Faraday's voice, but knew he'd follow through. Tossed him a nod, opened the conference room door, and went in to be raked across the coals by the Joint Chiefs of Staff who'd wanted to see him much earlier, but had simply not been urgent enough to trump crisis management. He was going to need their cooperation, though, if he planned to catch up to the mask-faced young murderer, chase him back to his nest, and burn it to the ground.

He hated politics, but he'd never met a fight he was willing to run from.

* * *

_**A/N: **Faraday is another somewhat horrible but not evil spy person I have left untouched. 'Bill' is William Wintergreen, Slade's British best friend; they served together, somehow. (Sometimes **Adeline** is British, she was his Spec Ops instructor, I don't think the Deathstroke writers know how countries work.) Slade here is a Republican who somehow snagged Clinton's second term from him—that must have been some campaign; toppling a competent incumbent is not easy. _

_He fancies himself a second Eisenhower and has focused heavily on domestic infrastructure, and also his war bona-fides and insider knowledge have made him unusually able to crack down on the waste and graft in the Pentagon's incredibly vast budget, the military-industrial complex old five-star correctly warned was such a danger. He's not that popular with his Joint Chiefs.  
_

_Deathstroke's identity, to my view, has always hinged on his status as a dad. That's why they kept replacing his dead kids until he had three. He didn't even used to be a bad one, for being Deathstroke, but the writers decided to make him crazy for the new millennium. ^^ That one time he teamed up with the Doom Patrol to save the Titans because Joey and Gar, and Mento was like 'you're not even worried' and Slade was like 'this is my worried face bitch, but how exactly is freaking out going to help our kids?'_


	53. Don't Say A Word

'Don't Say A Word'

**_A/N: _**_In honor of Leap Day, here's me fulfilling a request so old I have legitimately forgotten who placed it. ^_^; Sorry to whoever you are! Shoutout to me in a review and I'll give credit where due. You are awesome, I just clearly need to keep notes or something. _

_One gag in this chapter kinda ripped from _Who Killed Roger Rabbit_. Not to say Jokester is a 'toon, but I think it would be fair to say he possesses a certain spiritual kinship. Cousins through vaudeville, or something._

* * *

A knock sounded upon the door of the disused warehouse that the Jokester's Gotham Circus had recently adopted as their primary base. No answer came. Two knocks. Another silence. The visitor lifted his hand one more time, and rapped out a widely familiar, unmistakable rhythm. **_Tap_**_-tap taptaptap!_

One more silence lingered, almost unbearably, and then the door was wrenched open on a glowering clown in a checkered shirt. "Two bits!" he snapped back, and looked his visitor up and down. "We know you?" he asked, as his suspicious eyes landed back on the man's bandage-swathed face.

The tall man shook his head. He was wearing a long coat and a brimmed hat, giving him overall a vague resemblance both to the notorious Question and to the Circus' own Janus. "Mister Jokester," he greeted. His voice was deep, smooth, posh, and unfamiliar.

"It's Quinzel," the fugitive bit out. "J Quinzel. You got a name?"

"You may call me Mockingbird."

"Or I may not. Guess we'll see." Jokester paused a moment in an attitude of contemplation. "Nope," he announced after the moment had passed. "Don't think I will. Have a nice day."

He stepped back and shoved the heavy steel door sharply closed, but Mockingbird was in motion first, and jammed his booted foot in the way.

"Yow!" exclaimed Jokester, catching the door against his shoulder as it bounced open again, wide-eyed, as though _he_ was the one who'd just had a body part slightly crushed. "Use your words, man, sheesh."

He folded his arms and gave a sniff so casual it almost concealed the slight hitch in the gesture, that might have come from a heavy object being passed from his left hand into his right, as they switched places as 'hidden' and 'visible.' "Whaddya want, already? I'm warning you, getting your foot in the door with us takes a good bit more than just getting your actual foot caught in an actual door."

"You hate Owlman," said the bandaged man, not withdrawing his no-doubt-aching extremity, in case the door closed as soon as he did, but not crowding forward either. "Right?"

The clown drummed his fingernails on grey-painted steel. "Duh."

"And Bruce Wayne?"

Jokester sighed. "They're actually the same person, y'know."

"I wasn't sure _you_ did." Mockingbird laid his palm flat on the surface of the door. "I'm here to talk about revenge."

Jokester sucked in a long, thoughtful breath through his teeth. He tried to search his visitor's face, but even the eyes were shadowed enough by bandages that all he could read was _very intense mummy._ "Wait here a minute," he directed, and then very deliberately shut the door in Mockingbird's face, giving him plenty of time to get his foot out of the way.

The white-faced man had not smiled once through the whole exchange. Any Gothamite who'd paid sufficient attention over the years would know this was probably a bad sign.

Mockingbird was still waiting after eleven minutes, when the door swung open again, and Jokester wordlessly beckoned him inside. The space was darkened now, except for a single light over a lone wooden chair near what was probably the middle of the room, unless they'd erected a lot of internal subdivisions. On the far side of that stood arrayed, dimly, in an arc that cut the chair off from everything except the exit, the entirety of the known Gotham Circus. Even Basil Karlo, the shapeshifter, last heard of in Bialya foiling an assassination attempt on Queen Zazzala.

"Have a seat," the Jokester invited, gesturing grandly toward the chair.

"A tad theatrical, don't you think?" Mockingbird inquired, though he did sit down.

"It's what we do."

The big man shrugged, allowing this as a fairly reasonable statement, or at least declining to debate it. "You're willing to hear my proposal?"

Jokester shrugged. "Yeah, but no promises. I guess you know everybody by reputation—this is the Reformer, though, in case you don't. Guys, he says we should call him Mockingbird."

Ivy looked different, wearing jeans and a sky-blue turtleneck rather than a green bodystocking and living vines, but she was even more lovely with her face showing, even dressed in a less flattering color than emerald, and if you were looking for it, unmistakable. She drummed her fingertips on her elbow, and looked down at Mockingbird through hooded eyes. "You're not going to introduce yourself any more than that?"

"I prefer to maintain…plausible deniability."

Jokester snorted. "That would be fine if we already had a pretty good idea about you and your motives, but Bandage Man, we don't know jack."

Red Hood, also maskless, shifted his stance a hair in a way that managed to convey agreement. Enigma, the only one in his full costume, small mask over his eyes concealing almost nothing because his vigilante identity had been tied conclusively to his real name years ago, leaned forward into the light. The shadow cast by his hat-brim hid his face better than mask or gloom had.

"You know who we are, and we don't know you. You're the one who came here asking us to trust you. That's a two-way street."

The man called Mockingbird sat still in his surrounded chair for a few seconds, and then reached up to take off his own hat. Silence reigned as he began to unwind the mask of bandages. The face that emerged matched his voice perfectly, cast from the same general mold as Wayne's, or Harvey's before his injury—clear, strong lines that spoke of careful breeding and more careful rearing. Glances passed around the encircling Circus, each met by a shake of the head. No, nobody knew him.

He took a moment to gauge their expressions, blue eyes hard to read. "My name is Thomas Elliot," he announced. "I'm a surgeon." He took a small breath, as though for strength. "My mother was the first person Bruce Wayne ever killed."

* * *

**_A/N:_**_ First installment of 'Hush!' Originally it was going to transition into an extended flashback, but I decided this scene works better on its own.  
_


	54. Circus of Dreams

'Circus of Dreams'

**_A/N:_**_ Welcome! Second anniversary extravaganza clocking in at over **eleven thousand words**, with all my love for everybody who's read, followed, or reviewed this story at any point in that span. (Although if anyone reviewed without reading I will be…actually really impressed, since most of you have left detailed enough feedback it would be hard to BS. :D) _

_Credit for 'The Bicameral Man,' by the way, goes to my mother. Suggested listening is the Gandalf Murphy/Grand Slambovians album _A Good Thief Tips His Hat_._

* * *

"It's like you don't even notice the sinks are a foot too low."

J jumped, banging his wrist on the faucet; the running water had drowned out Harvey's footsteps up the echoing hallway outside, so the voice from the bathroom door had taken him by surprise. He stuck his tongue out at his lawyer friend and grabbed the hand towel Ed had laid out, rather than burn electricity on running the air dryers. "Hey, you! Welcome home. Maybe I'm reliving my childhood."

Harvey rolled his eyes, and didn't point out that J hadn't had a childhood, or contest being welcomed home, even though, officially, he didn't live with them anymore. _Such_ a nice guy, heh. "They wouldn't have been too short when you were a kid. That's the _point._"

J shrugged. "Maybe I'm reliving a previous life where I was really, really tall." Harvey once again cast his eyes up to heaven. He was probably the foremost expert on the ceilings of everywhere they'd lived. "Come on," J said. "We have a bit over ten minutes 'til dinner, and Harley was wanting your opinion on some setup stuff for the new clinic. She left it all in seventh-grade English."

Stepping aside to let Jokester out of the bathroom, Harvey made a small exasperated noise, which J considered a sign he was in fine form. So far he'd managed to get half his friends to give up on making him stop referring to all the rooms in the abandoned middle school by their previous functions, and he was bucking for all by the end of the week. There was a possibility Pam would vine him to the ceiling before then if he didn't stop, of course, but those were the risks you took in show business.

The building had been a good find. As the school budget shrank, the districts crammed the same number of kids into less and less space to save on operating costs, which of course increased the drop-out rate, meaning the smaller space came closer to being adequate—J figured this worked out for _somebody_. It sure wasn't the kids.

Right now, it was him and his friends; they'd needed a new main base after busting Jason out of the Owl's screwy torture chamber, and this was far enough away from all his previous digs that it should take a while to track them down. And there was so much _space_. It was like living in a castle. A minimally furnished castle with big windows and polyvinyl-chloride flooring, admittedly, but squatters can't be choosers.

They were very comfortable squatters, too, because their resident electro-mechanical engineer had gotten the water hooked back up, and installed a bigger version of his old solar generator on the roof. It was going to be chilly once the seasons changed, since the school's heating system had been expensively inefficient in the first place and there was no way they could keep the furnace topped up all winter, but there was time to prepare for that.

J figured if they were still here by then, they'd slap up extra insulation on a few rooms, especially over the windows, get a couple of space heaters in there, and huddle. It would still be more spacious than year before last. Depending on who was around by that point, possibly more so than last year, too. Pam was being seriously wooed by the League of Shadows again; he swore Ra's was going to try sending chocolates any day now. (Not cut flowers, though. He knew better.)

He glanced sidelong at Harvey, who'd finally requalified for the state bar and was now practicing law out of a storefront in Crime Alley, with a little apartment up above just for him. It was good he was getting his feet under him again, probably, even if the contrast between this and the life he'd ground his way through law school to achieve probably stung sometimes worse than not practicing at all.

But J didn't like the feeling of having one of his best friends out of his reach, and so visible. He had his _name _on a _sign._

He kept waiting for the Owl to strike. Maybe he wasn't sure Harvey was Janus? He wore a mask for a reason, but still. It wasn't exactly a subtle pseudonym. Maybe he thought that if he started making moves like that, they'd find a way to blow up his mansion in Bristol. Not a bad idea, but an ounce of prevention was worth a pound of cure, as Harley always said when she got her hands on vaccines.

"Clients treating you okay?"

Harvey looked sour. "Clients are skinflint. And while I understand _why_, it doesn't mean I'm going to let them harangue me for hours and then walk away without paying for my time."

"No, it's fair," said J. "Know what you're worth."

A too-rare smile split both of Harvey's faces, and he fell into step with J up the echoing hall. "Where's Jon?"

"Hehe, lab. I'm not sure he's left since he got his stuff set up."

The lab had once been a science classroom, of course, but with everything the chemist had hauled in to equip it, it was make-no-bones-about-it a bona-fide-lab, and much more suited to the purpose than any of his last three. The computers and most of the books had been cleared out of the school library when the place was closed down, of course, but they'd left the tables with the rolling keyboard trays, so Ed had set up a hacker cave of his own in there. They'd been using this base for almost over two months now, and it was nice seeing everybody settled into their own spaces in a shared building. They couldn't always manage that.

Harvey shook his head at Jon's lab-burrowing. "It's good he loves his work, I suppose."

They turned the last corner before the one that would bring the stairwell into view, and J raised an eyebrow at his friend. "You s'pose?"

"Cooking up experimental drugs in an abandoned building is a little…"

"He doesn't _just_ make drugs."

"I'm just saying there are good reasons that sort of thing is regulated."

"The pharmaceutical lobby, mostly," Jokester muttered, slouching.

"It's hard to mock conspiracy theorists when we're up to our necks in Owls, I admit, but J. In all seriousness. There are things that _need_ regulation."

"Hah, and there's the lawyer talking."

"I _am_ a lawyer."

He _was_ a lawyer. But he was also the raging anarchist who they both still sometimes worried would lose track of himself in the moment, and wake up slick with blood. J didn't bring that part up. "Well, with your two-housed-ness an' all…"

The Bicameral Man flung up a hand in halfhearted frustration. "Look, I picked something shorter so it's easier to shout in a crisis—"

"Only so I'd stop calling you Bikey," J interjected.

Harvey ignored him. "So can't you let it rest? 'Janus _the_ Bicameral Man' is a compromise."

"It sounds even worse than the original," J groused.

"You've been ragging on the name since I picked it," Harvey stated, which was accurate. Eight years, it had been. "I'm starting to feel harassed."

"Don't feel harassed. Just pay attention."

"Oh yes, I forgot perpetual annoyance is your favored method of getting your way."

J laughed. "Don't see how you managed that. It's a whole _lifestyle_."

Harvey looked even sourer than before, all lemon-sucking, and J hunched his shoulders, snorted, and after a few seconds went into a forward roll that kicked up into a handstand, and pointedly walked the rest of the way to the stairs upside down. Harvey didn't react even to sigh at him. He didn't even roll his eyes.

"J," he did say, when they got to the stairs and J paused to decide whether going up them on his hands was worth the effort, "I actually am aware you only sulk like this when you know you're wrong. It's my name. I should get to pick it."

J sighed, and let himself fall onto his feet, where he slouched against the abnormally low bannister for a second, and then started on the stairs, glancing under his elbow at his taller friend as he went. "Okay, yeah, it's your choice. Just…the _Bicameral Man_, Harv? Really?"

There was a logic there. A layered, twisty logic, which he guessed you should expect considering it was Harvey. Bicameral literally was 'two houses' but metaphorically 'two-headed,' which probably only worked because you almost never heard the word used for anything except legislatures, which brought in _law_. And for bonus points Asimov's _Bicentennial_ Man had been a robot trying to become human, which J assumed was an intentional reference though he wasn't sure what it was supposed to _mean_.

The whole thing put him out of sorts.

Harvey looked sulky. "I thought you'd like it," he said, as he climbed. Like maybe he'd thought up the pun, years ago now, just for Jokester.

J got the joke. He really did. He got the _message, _even, a couple layers deep, about who Harvey was and what he wanted to be and what his scars meant to him. It was a good name, except that it was _stupid_. Most people wouldn't understand it. It could alienate people from him, in the slums, worse than any of his Harvard-trained attitudes and mannerisms, almost as bad as his past as the DA, because a joke people didn't understand was automatically a joke at their expense, and—seriously, Dent—_most people don't know any Latin_.

If J's memory weren't so good, if Ted the graduate student hadn't taken the time to explain the nested layers of the US governments to him years ago in the kind of sparkling, disorderly detail only the truly obsessed ever produced, he might very well not have gotten the joke himself.

"It makes you sound like a sideshow attraction," he said out loud, finally, as they reached the next landing.

The unmarred half of Harvey's face bent into an unhappy smile. "Well, they do call our little club the Circus. Guess every circus needs its freaks."

Bitterness was never good. J bit his lip. "Harv—" he began, as he pulled open the third-floor door. It opened on a cluster of guys in SWAT gear, bulky black, almost as startled as him. One lowered his assault rifle at Jokester's face.

"Nope!" J slammed the door closed again, and knelt to throw the weird bolts that went down into the floor. They wouldn't last long. This was a school, not a fortress. "Up!" he called at Harvey, for the SWAT guys' benefit, gesturing the opposite with his hands. As one, they flew back down to the second floor as quietly as they could, as the metal door shook behind them with the weight of SWAT heels.

When they reached the first cross-corridor, J shoved Harvey to the right while veering into the left-hand turn-off himself.

"Split up. Get everyone out. I'll draw them off!"

"But you—_argh!_" Harvey's knuckles were almost as white as Jokester's, and if he could have spared the time he would clearly have put it through the nearest wall and not felt the pain until later. But there was no time, and he turned and ran.

No sooner had he vanished when another batch of SWAT cops burst through the door at the end of Jokester's chosen hallway, bristling with military-grade weapons.

"Whoop!" No going _that_ way. But he couldn't run after Harvey either…he ducked into the hall he'd just left, to at least stop presenting a target for the next few seconds.

"This is a raid!"

"I got that, thanks!"

Maybe he could double back and go up another level?

But back the way he came, the first unit had spilled into the stairs, filling the entryway with guns and shields and big black boots. That left one direction.

J rolled across the mouth of the corridor he'd meant to run down, popped up, and charged straight ahead.

He flung himself flat and rolled as bullets tore into the plaster. Only one gun's worth; the rest were holding their fire. Did they want him alive? He scampered onward, then dropped again, hands over his ears, as a combination of flash-bangs and what seemed to be _actual concussion grenades _ricocheted after him. In a hallway, guys? Seriously? Jackknifed up at the next corner, pulled a fire alarm, and booked it as the lights and klaxons started. They wanted to play the shock and awe game? He could play that. He was pretty sure he was a higher-rated smoke and mirrors technician than anybody in the police department.

Unfortunately, he was also outnumbered, and he only just ducked around the shelter of the next corner in time, as a flashbang rolled along the good, solid PVC-formica flooring. Then he held still with his back against the wall for a second, as it went off in the police's way, mentally enumerating his resources.

At least he knew the floorplan better, though SWAT was usually professional enough, even in Gotham, that they'd probably had a look at the blueprints before bursting in.

They _hadn't_ been ready for the rolling chair full of cleaning supplies that they met caroming toward them as they rounded the next corner after that, and which they reflexively shot to death. J heard them slipping and sliding on the puddling soap as he fled on. Too bad he hadn't had time to cook up anything more violently reactive.

But there were still pounding boots—drat their professionalism anyway, some of them must have hung back—and he stretched his stride as he made for the end of the hall—and dropped, automatically, at the singing buzz of bullets and, almost simultaneous, the crack of guns.

_What'd __**I**__ do?_ he demanded poutishly of the universe. Everybody official always trying to kill him. And then the Arkham goons asked why he had problems with authority.

Eighth grade biology, finally! There was a fire escape out the window here; they'd made a point of it, what with Jon's record for lab accidents that went boom.

J dived right, slammed the door behind him, rolled upright surrounded by gleaming glass beakers and alembics and humming higher-tech gear he couldn't name.

Lab, yes. Jon, no. Either he'd actually gone to dinner, _early_ even, or he'd heard the alarm and gotten out already. Or they'd caught him, but there was no sign of a fight. The escape window _was_ open, but it was a warm day, so that might not mean anything.

Another concussion grenade sailed through the missing pane on the door. _Not good!_ J dived for cover behind the nearest workbench. And then—

—all the world was _bang_ and the shattering of glass. And now a sharp smell, sticking in his lungs, and he needed to get up and keep moving, but his limbs were oddly heavy…and…_prickling…._

_._

_…_

**_…_**

_**!**_

* * *

_The spotlight came down hot enough to burn. He stood in the smell of sawdust and straw, sweat and melting greasepaint, and somewhere a whiff of large animals, surrounded by banks of shadow that rustled with the breath and murmuring of a mighty crowd. The invisible, most important part of the show. His _audience.

_He grinned, wide as his wide wide mouth would go, and flung his arms open so the tails of his green-and-golden coat lashed. The wordless human voices fell, expectant, waiting for him to speak._

_"Welcome one, welcome all! Welcome to the greatest show on earth! I know they all say that, but none can compare with Gotham for the bizarre and astounding! We will move you to laughter and tears, and I promise…" His grin widened impossibly. "_We will make you scream."

_They were counting on it. Someone whooped._

_"I bring before you for your pleasure, ladies and gentlemen, the most lurid and dramatic acts to be found in every foul or fair corner of our great city! Freaks and geeks and monsters galore, and acts of derring-do that would shrivel the liver of the boldest among you! As the Lord of Misrule, I bring you…the Circus!"_

_Drumroll please. Somewhere outside the ring, a drummer complied._

_"Our first stupefying attraction: The Human Crocodile!" _

_A second spotlight flicked on, the first act standing to one edge of the ring, his back to the narrow curtained corridor for entrances and exits where there was no audience seating. Footlights glinted off scales, off the tip of a lashing tail, off long yellow teeth and golden eyes as Waylon flaunted his every irregularity for the crowd, naked to the waist. There were cries of awe and fear and disgust and admiration._

_"He's part of the freak show _and_ our strong man!" Jokester caroled, as the reptile-man flexed his muscles demonstratively. _

_He was posed before a display of vegetation, thick with ferns and vines, that seemed intended to invoke the Jurassic era, as though he was not a crocodile at all, but a Tyrannosaur. (He looked, honestly, more like a tyrannosaur, though his mighty arms were unlike either creature, or any known thing with scales.) _

_Waylon kicked off his show with two 500-pound barbells, pumping them up and down with slow deliberation, and then raising them, one in each hand, until his arms lay parallel to the ground at their fullest extension, such a simply pose that required such incredible power._

_The audience began to murmur and then to whoop, as the strongman's biceps began to shake slightly under the strain and yet he held position. His feet were firmly planted in the middle of the ring, but then behind the Jurassic scenery there came the sound of a gunning engine, and a moment later a tiny blonde woman in a spangled body stocking rode a Harley-Davidson motorcycle out into the ring._

_This was in itself apparently occasion for cheering, and she did a lap to wave to the audience, jumping up twice to kneel in the handlebars as she rode and wave with both hands and blow kisses. Then she pulled around to face the Human Crocodile, still holding his thousand pounds of weight with trembling arms. Gunned the engine meaningfully with her hands tight on the brakes._

**_Charged_**_, as if in some sort of deranged game of crocodile/motorcycle chicken, and still Waylon held his position._

_Until the final second, when he let both weights drop, to hit the ground with force that sawdust could not absorb, that shivered through the ground and up into the stands, for any doubters that had thought the bars misleadingly labeled. He dropped them, but instead of dodging he crouched between them, presenting his shoulders to the oncoming motorbike—_

_And then she pulled a trick, or he did, or they both did, and the motorcycle had ridden up onto his back and stopped there._

_Slowly, the strongman straightened, the blonde waving happily to accept the crowd's accolades. Then he hooked both hands under the body of the bike and lifted it, machine and rider._

_At the same time the woman braced her hands on the seat and lifted herself, with equal slow precision, into a handstand._

_Both of them simultaneously let go with one hand, and then the Human Crocodile turned slowly to let every section of the audience see Harlequin's upside-down grin._

_She flipped around to riding position again as he set her on her wheels, and then was off, on another lap, and from behind the set came galloping a small herd of tiny ponies done up in circus barding, a collections of dogs including a toy poodle that kept rising up on its hind legs and running along like that for several step and a St. Bernard that had a calico cat perched on its broad back, two hyenas in top hats, and an oddly smug-looking zebra._

_The animals poured after Harlequin in a gleeful muddle, and by the time they began their second circuit the strongman had set up a series of low hurdles. Harlequin took them on her bike and many of the animals poured after her—the hyenas, the zebra, several of the ponies, the golden retrievers, the Dalmatian; the St Bernard almost lost its cat, and the toy poodle sensibly, and to the crowd's amusement, went under the obstacle. It didn't even need to duck._

_Two of the ponies balked, and as the rest of the cavalcade swept onward remained sulkily grouped by the first hurdle. Harlequin took the next jump standing up, and the strongman stood over the laggardly ponies and frowned, then theatrically shook his head. The bay stamped; the piebald blew._

_Waylon picked up a pony under each arm and hopped over the barrier._

_To hoots and cries from the audience, he neatly set down the ponies, which had been trained to act recalcitrant but not surprised and had taken the whole thing very calmly, then gave them each a light slap across the haunches that was their signal to __**gallop**__, leaping hurdles with effortless grace until they caught up with their fellows, at which point the whole crew followed Harlequin out of the ring, hyenas and all._

_This left Waylon alone in the footlights, back where he had started, and finally, the Human Crocodile reached behind him to lift the __**set**__._

_The plants were real, rooted in a huge, deep pot that normally could not have been taken on and off stage without special machinery. The two smallish but full-grown trees, apple and ash, swayed as Waylon swung the tub across his shoulders and slowly, inexorably straightened up as he had under the motorcycle, Atlas lifting a small world. As he reached his full height, a flower bud formed between the trunks, huge and red, and as he raised the mighty burden above his head with both straining arms, it swelled and grew until it burst, and the petals unfurled to reveal the curled form of a woman, just barely clothed in leaves. _

_The ringleader spread his hands and got back in on the action with a bellow. "And now we bring you the stupendous, the salacious…Climbing Ivy!" _

_Ivy unfolded, posing for the crowd in each direction, provocative and unflappable. They roared, and then she flung her head back and spread her arms, and two bolts of silken fabric, jungle-green, descended from the catwalks to meet her hands, and she swung herself up, in a looping, circling motion that looked effortless, though it couldn't have been._

_Below, the strongman carried away his weights and weighty set-piece, clearing the ring, but the lights and the attention of the crowd had both left him, and moved up to the silk-dancer._

_She cocooned herself in the silks, twisted, spun, green twining into vines and catching the air to fan out like great shining leaves, or wings. She posed like she was flying, she dropped like she was falling, but always, the silk caught her, wrapped her, safe and soft. She twirled, once, on and on, toes toward the hidden sky until even the audience was dizzy, and then brought herself gracefully to a halt, and danced on._

_Usually, at the end of a silk-dancer's act, she descended, but Ivy climbed, up and up, her hands spread and empty as her legs coiled her upward, until she reached the second-highest platform on the tent's mighty central pole, gave a little swing, seized hold…and left her silks behind. They billowed absently, catching emerald light._

_Pam took a bow, to thunderous applause, and then vanished through the rigging while one spotlight held fast on her earlier position, and the other dropped to the loudest clown._

_"And now, ladies _and _gentlemen, we bring to you. Without a partner, without a net, the death-defying feats of the latest-and-greatest…__**Red Hood!**__"_

_The spot flicked those last fifteen feet up, to the crown of the Big Top. The invisible trumpeters gave a fanfare._

_Jason looked very small on a wooden platform so very high, without his leather or his helmet. Much younger than fifteen. He was wearing Talon's tunic again (though at least in his own deep red, shades darker than the blood-bright cape), and nothing else. He brushed his hands against one another, then wrapped them around the bar of the trapeze, snapped the thin cotton cord that had held it within reach, and fell like a stone on a string._

_He spun himself around the bar as it swooped—butt, elbows, knees, for a frozen moment ankles only, and then he finished his spin to head over heels, and came up to standing as the trapeze finished its long forward sweep, and began to fall back again. Jason fell back, too, in an arc that took him down from the bar until only his hands were high enough to grasp it—they did, and he swung forward once more, extending the pendulum with the length of his body for a little extra momentum, a little extra distance. _

_Cast himself into thin air, just long enough to spin up, up and close his fingers around another, higher trapeze bar. Another thin cord snapped under his weight, and on new steel cables the boy fell-swung-flew faster than before._

_And at the highest point of that arc, let go. The audience shrieked as he somersaulted up, and somewhere behind his grin Jokester shouted _No! _because there was no other trapeze there to grab and no net…but…_

_Almost before his upward momentum ran out, just as his flight became a fall, the acrobat alighted on a nearly-invisible cable strung tight between the Big Top's central poles, light as a soap bubble. Bird on a wire._

_It was not enough to walk the line. He walked it backward, placing every certainty in what he could not see. He toppled into a roll. He threw a cartwheel, and then was at the end of the tightrope, beside the roof support. He raised a foot as if to step off into the wooden platform where the cable was anchored, and was halted by a chorus of boos._

_"Not done yet, sonny!" the ringleader heard himself shriek._

_Jason's shoulders slumped for a second, and then he flipped backward, his palms pressed into the cable, __**spun**__, and then flipped again onto his feet, facing the length of the high wire again._

_Jokester reached into his bag of tricks and drew out the bright, clean arc of a broad, curved sword—not a fine weapon, not elegant; gaudy with glass jewels and false gilt as befit its place here in the ring, but sharp. Dangerous enough. _

_"Here!"_

_End over end the scimitar spun up, until it smacked hilt-first into the young Hood's palm, and he whipped it in a complicated figure of eternity._

_Slowly at first, he moved. It was almost a fight with an invisible opponent. It was almost an acrobatic routine. It was a sword-dance, all alone on the high wire._

_Almost, the enemy took shape. Breath withheld, the audience could almost see the blows the Red Hood ducked with a deceptively easy somersault, the blade against which his caught, could almost have sworn one sword struck another in a burst of sparks. So real, the enemy that wasn't there, that he dodged too forcefully in a single second, and had to lurch back, the pattern broken, the illusion of his enemy shattered as his neck remained where the invisible sword should have been, and was not severed._

_And now, as if the perfection of his rhythm had been all that was holding him in place, he began to falter. A step in the dance was missed in favor of something less elegant, but better balanced. He wobbled. He seemed to recover, spun through the next steps of the dance with only the faintest waver, and—leapt—landed—rolled—whirled—_**fell**_._

_Truly, this time, and the promised screams rose again from the crowd, and this time there was no new trapeze, no hidden wire, no harness. He hit the sawdust at breakneck speed in a crack of bone and the sick, wet sound of his own sword coming out his back._

**Schleck.**

_The boy lay in a crumpled heap of black and red, scarlet-smeared steel standing proudly above him, as the music trailed away. Screaming began again, and a new, more horrified susurration as all but the most bloodthirsty spectators recoiled. When it began to seem like someone might break for the exit, the ringleader stepped forward, into the margin of the patient spotlight that had followed their falling star all the way down. _

_"Ladies! Gentlemen! Please, remain in your seats! The show's not _nearly_ done yet!" _

_Somebody booed. Jokester pointed a long white finger at that section of the stands and looked disapproving. "Now, is that any way to behave?" He looked down and prodded his acrobat with a toe. "Come on, stop being lazy."_

_"Booo!" came that thin voice from somewhere high in the stands, and then it gained companions, scattered, but rising in volume._

_"Hear that?" the ringleader expostulated. "You're makin' me look bad!" He tapped a foot. "Gimme that back," he demanded, and turned the boy over with his foot to gain access to the sword hilt. A handkerchief appeared in his hand to gingerly wipe at the worst trickles of gore, and then he seized the spangled grip and tugged. _

_Red Hood's blue-green eyes flew open with a harsh, wet gasp, and then he lay there, panting, shocked, as the clown in chief shook his blood off the blade. "You got it dirty," he scolded. Slid the gaudy thing back into its sheath with a theatrical metallic ringing, which came from scraping the blade against the bright tin ring around the top._

_Offered Jason a hand up._

_The wirewalker's palm slapped into his, and the ringleader hauled him up. Slapped him bracingly on one shoulder once he was standing again. "Here, put this away for me," he ordered, giving the sheathed sword back, and grinned once again at the crowd._

_"You saw it here, folks! Can't nothing keep this boyo down. Unfortunately Red needs to go change into a clean costume, but don't be discouraged! We have our next act all ready to fly, __**as a moth to a flame..!**_"

_Those trumpets again, and the spotlight left him._

_The new aerialists were Garfield and Cameron, on the trapeze, and they too flew without a net, even though there was no sign of their wings._

_"Thaaat's right, folks! And if they fall they will _not _get up again! Place your bets now!"_

_They spun and twisted until Firefly all covered in red and gold sequins flipped high enough to brush his fingers against the canvas roof, tucked his limbs against his chest and spun head over heels as he fell again—once, twice, thrice…he was nothing but a blur of flame-color and glinting gold, must be clocking forty mph rotational velocity, enough to knock a man out all on its own, even without hitting anything, such as the ground, and there __**was no net**__—_

_Velvet gloves closed around his glittering hands, and with his knees locked fast around the trapeze to support them both, Garfield's partner swung him smoothly out of the spin, bleeding off his huge collected energy in a long, perfect arc, and then let go. Firefly sailed across the ring, spinning, tangled himself in Pam's still-dangling silks, and descended in an orderly twirl._

_"Awwwww," said Jokester's big glad mouth, as the older flier vanished again into the shadowed depths of the tent roof. "No blood this time, sorry folks. Putchyer hands together for how good a catcher the Mothman is! Maybe some other day we'll see if his boy can catch _him_ so good."_

_Silk and velvet rolled and winged away, Firefly took the ring alone. He snapped his fingers, and a tiny flame burst into being. Jokester tossed him a long kerosene torch—the young man caught it, lit it from his sequined fingertips, and smoothly caught the next, and then the one after that. _

_After that he began to keep them in the air, as the ringmaster threw torch after torch, until two spinning wheels of flame spread like wings across the ring, and then the fire-juggler began to count down again, catching his pieces one by one, dousing their fires in his mouth to the particularly vocal delight of some children in the audience, blowing out each time a plume of flame, and throwing the flameless torches back to the clown in the coat of tails, who made them vanish up his sleeves. Then, as the number of spinning fires in the air shrunk to five, the fire-eater began to _run_. _

_Around the ring, over the hurdles left by the animal act, and then through a hoop, which he set on fire with one of the flaming pins as he passed the first time. When the number of torches in the air dropped to three, they began to arc so high that he had time to pull a handspring while they were all in the air. To dive through the flaming hoop and land ready to catch them and repeat their staggered pattern again, still moving. Then at last he caught the last spinning pin, and snuffed its flame between his lips, and bowed, and straightened in the showering applause—_

_—and lifted his head and breathed a stream of flame that licked up into the swings and wires and seemed _just for a moment _like it was going to shed light even on the shrouded audience. And then it was gone, but Firefly caught the fading sparks between his fingers and spun them into a ball of fire between his hands that spun and spun and grew and grew until—_

_—it __**burst**__ in a cloud of menacing smoke, which thinned to reveal that the glittering fire-eater had disappeared, and instead a tall, twiggy form loomed in the middle of the ring, all flaring cloak and flashing lights. The violins of the invisible orchestra hummed low beneath the thundering applause. _

_"The Alchemist of Fear!" the ringmaster announced in a sepulchral hush when the clapping had begun to fade, and then fell back and let terror take the Big Top. Smoke and mirrors and the flap of leathery wings, the hiss of kissing blades, and the certainty that __**something **__was watching each and every one of you…_

_All the screaming anyone could ask._

_The thing of sticks and straw that stood at the center of the nightmare called up horror upon nameless horror, things that writhed and things that watched and things that once you looked away you could not say what they had been, only that they shouldn't, and finally a suit of armor, red and gold, and you knew that if it lifted up its visor there would be nothing but a staring skull and…_

_wrenching…_

_cold…_

_After that they needed something light, so the Master of Revelry called for his fools, and here they came. Jason again, guts safely back inside, in a red football helmet four times the size of his head, and Garfield dressed now as a comic fireman, and Pam in a ridiculous candy-apple-colored wig, and Edna hitting everything with her handbag and being very threatening with knitting needles, and Roman Sionis in a black half-mask doing a very grouchy Pierrot, and what appeared to be the one and only long-dead Joseph Grimaldi himself, though after a minute Jokester realized it was only Basil in disguise, and great fun was had by all getting him to admit it._

_Another juggler, Ozzie Cobblepot in oversized spats, Leslie doing a sleight-of-hand act where she sawed people in half and sewed them back together. _

_Now Harlequin was back, as though she had never left, and she performed a spectacular contortionist's act, eeling her way through spaces too narrow even for someone her size, bending back until her body arced into a perfect circle, rolling heels over head like a human wheel, and then wrapping limb over limb until it seemed the knot was too complex to ever untie. Then she untangled herself, bounced upright, and tugged at the ringleader's hair, laughing. Cartwheeled away. He chased. _

_She was always just outside his reach, and as the crowd fell about laughing stuck out her foot and sent him into a spectacular pratfall. He flung a handful of sawdust at her, and she stuck her tongue out at him, and pulled a giant hammer from seemingly nowhere, and now it was _his_ turn to run._

_And from there, without anything so stable as an introduction, they had slid before he knew it into a Punch and Judy show, flinging in one another's faces brutal violence and casual hate and easy lies, and the certainty that they would never ever be able to escape one another, and come to think on it, he had _never_ really liked Mr. Punch. _

_"Who's a clever fellow, then?!" he screeched, and broke a bottle over Harlequin's head. The crowd roared._

_Harlequin kicked him in the stomach._

_There was more to the show before Punch and Judy could be done; a rollicking chase up the rigging and down again, a dancing skeleton, a complicated business with a string of sausages that had Waylon guest-starring as the traditional crocodile; but before long they had come round to the start. There he was, swinging the swaddled bundle that was the Baby against the great wooden pillar holding up the roof, and the swaddling was loosening until a small plump hand reached out and pushed the folds aside, and as Jokester drew the bundle back again familiar greeny-blue eyes blinked out, bewildered._

_"Daddy?" said Ella, and then struck against the mighty central tent-pole and burst, like a firework, into a cloud of light and smoke and confetti._

_Glitter settled over everything in the center ring, gold as bright as day. The crowd found their voices again and howled—appalled, amused, approving. Coins pattered out of the dark. Good show._

_"__**That's**__ the way to do it!" he declared, all delight, and saw, through the dancing glitter and sawdust, the figure of Harlequin rising up, with Judy's club in hand to punish him, but he just didn't have _time_ for that. Something colder than the slapstick in his hand._

**Bang! **_she dropped._

_They laughed. So did he._

_"What's this, my friends?" he called out, brushing glitter off his coat and making the handgun vanish up his sleeve with the motion. "How irregular! My family seems to have exploded!" Laughter. "We'll need someone sharp to get to the bottom of this one, and since two heads are better than one, please welcome…The Bicameral Man!"_

_Lights came up on a raised platform in the next ring, and the figure there turned, with slow deliberation, so that the audience on every side could see both faces, each at the end of its own neck. Both familiar, both strange._

_"There's no point being concerned," opined the head on the left; beautiful, cold. "The woman is dead, that's plain enough. If a wrong of any consequence has been done, it will be taken before a court, and the law will see justice done—stop _**laughing!**_" it snapped at the crowd, composure lost, for they had seen at once that a freak of nature talking natural justice was a fine, crude irony._

_"Of course they're laughing!" burst out the head on the right. _

_Its eyes flashed almost-real fire, and its skin was nothing but twisting scars. "Justice, law—what are they worth? Can you eat them? The law's a sham. All you can do is go out and enact justice with your own hands." The crowd was laughing at this, too, but the burned face didn't protest; it bared its teeth, challenging them all. "Mock me all you like!" he shouted. "It won't change what I know!"_

_"You know nothing!" retorted the angel face. "There is a _right way to do things!_"_

_"Freak!" shouted someone hidden in the shadows of the risers, outside the lighted ring. It seemed like a voice he should know. He couldn't place it._

_The Bicameral Man had forgotten their audience entirely._

_"You let your procedures and _right way_ get in the way of actually _doing_ anything that's right!" said the scarred half._

_"Just because the system is imperfect is no reason to abandon it. If people fall through the cracks, well, either they should have taken more care not to fall, or someone should try to patch the cracks."_

_"Victim-blaming bastard!" ugly head snarled. "Keeping people from falling is the whole _point!_ It's too flawed to patch. Burn it. Burn it all!" _

_The crowd rolled in the aisles._

_"You're scum," said the left face._

_"__**You're**__ the reason no one trusts your precious law."_

_"You're a criminal. And you know what you deserve."_

_From somewhere in the shadow-shrouded depths of the canopy, a single rope dropped, with a noose at the end._

_"Yes," admitted the burned and twisted head, clenching its matching right hand. "I know."_

_The left hand rose, lifted, and settled the loop of rope over the head on the right, whose scars twisted in a bitter smirk. "A fine hempen collar you've found me," Harvey said._

_"A fine necktie you've _earned,_" retorted Harvey, and his finely-cut lips tightened as a ripple of nervous laughter rippled through the crowd. They weren't laughing at his repetition, though. They were laughing because, behind him, a second patient rope had fallen out of the dark. Dramatic irony is a fine thing, when you're outside of it._

_"Mm. But there's something you forgot," said the monstrous head, slipknot swinging against its left cheekbone._

_Handsome long-lashed eyes narrowed. "What?"_

_"Where I go, so do you." Fast as thought, the burn-scarred hand lashed out, looped the other noose around the other neck._

_He stepped off the stage._

_It took skill enough to hang the usual one-necked sort of man properly, efficiently, with minimal strangulation and suffering, but the knots were true and the measure of rope must have been perfect, and two sharp cracks rang out as two spines broke. Two boots kicked for seconds only, and were still._

_The unseen presence in the lofts hoisted Harvey out of sight to deafening cheers. _

_"Hangman's done," Jokester said to the crowd, when the noise had begun to die. "Constable too, and I __**am**_ _the Clown. Anyone sending me a Devil?" _

_Everyone laughed again, and then the Big Top fell silent as though a cleaver had bitten into sound, and the ringmaster knew he should not have made that reckless invitation. The story was allowed to end without the devil. He should have let it. _

_He turned._

_On Harvey's abandoned platform fell a single narrow, weak beam, and just out of its circle of light lurked a presence, black and brooding._

_A smile touched the ringleader's red red mouth, and his voice when he spoke was as soft as it ever had been, since the footlights had first been lit. "So you came."_

_"Always," said the darkness._

_(Hello, darkness, my old friend…)_

_He narrowed his eyes. "Come out where I can see you. It's only fair."_

_"'Fair,'" replied the thing in shadow, as though the word were goods of dubious provenance, offered in barter._

_"Well, it's only _just_, then. They're the same thing, most of the time."_

_"You think so?" The inky blackness that hung outside the two patches of light stirred, and then obligingly invaded the spotlight below the hanged-man's noose, and now it had an outline, at least. It was where the light was not. Towering blackness, smooth with threat, crowned with two sharp horns._

**_Ah,_**_ the ringleader thought. __**Yes.**_

**_Of course._**

_He wasn't sure how long he stood, in his spotlight at the end of all things, as the audience's whispers faded, watching the Devil loom, but sooner or later he found his face bending into a frown. As much as it could._

_Something was…something was wrong. Everything was wrong._

_He stepped into the darkness outside his spotlight, and now the audience—fallen silent, as if they were all holding their breaths—could not see him, but he could feel the weight of the Devil's regard all the more heavily. "This is wrong," he whispered, and felt stronger for it. Stronger, but less ready to laugh, and that—that had never really happened before. _

_Had it?_

_Another step, and he stumbled over something in his path. Something heavy, and soft, that rolled a little with a sound like _thff_, and then the smell of blood hit and suddenly he could see the thing that had tripped him. Jason, lying in the sawdust again, broken and bloody as though from another, worse fall, and this time flesh and bone wasn't flowing back together. He wasn't healing. He lay cold._

_Jokester staggered back, to the sound of the gallows creaking somewhere above as Harvey swung gently, and his eyes landed on the central tent pole and there was Ed, impaled spread-eagled with a dozen spikes and his hat slipped down over his eyes but it didn't matter, because J still knew they were gone—gouged out, pecked by ravens, didn't matter, _gone. _And there was Waylon's empty skin, lying piled and hollow like someone's exotic trophy, and that withered pale rocking thing, was that was Pam would become if she was denied the sunlight long enough? And lying somewhere in the dark was…was…._

_Just before his knees hit the ground, he caught himself, swaying. Took a breath of air that no longer smelled of popcorn or sawdust or paint, only death; set his teeth, and mounted the steps to the gallows. Stared into the small patch of nearly-white that hung in the middle of the devil-dark. Everyone was gone. The night had taken them. (My fault) whispered his heart in darkness, and he could have torn it out with his own hands if he had been sure it was true. _

"This is a nightmare,"_ he said firmly. Saying it like he _knew_ it was so could help him learn to believe._

_"Foolish clown," replied the pillar of night. "You know already." He reached out with one great cold hand, claws pricking against Jokester's jawline as the Devil held his head in place. Judge's thin lips curled scornfully._

_"__**You've always been the nightmare.**__"_

_And now the darkness was rearing up, on every side. It had swallowed his audience, it had swallowed the ring, it had swallowed the gory column that held up the world and the spotlight he'd left behind him and everyone he'd left in it, and now it folded in, around the two of them, alone._

_"Are you afraid?" the voice was asking. "You pathetic little weasel, you sad little jokester. Are you afraid _yet?_"_

**_No,_** _he shouted, soundlessly, backing it with a wild cackle but now, for the first time, it was a lie, and he tasted that night in the chemical plant, iron and acid. (He would always fall. The night would always win. There was no bright madness that burned too hot to be snuffed out, not even the most wildly flickering star.)_

_And it didn't matter if he __**was**__ scared, he knew how to keep living through that, through anything, Arkham had taught him about surviving fear, and holding on then had led to the best thing ever, so now he _had_ to hold on for all the people who counted on him._

_Except no, he remembered, and his hold on the wrinkling night faltered. Because no one was counting on him, because he'd used them all up and thrown them away, lost them by feeding them to the dark for the sake of an audience who thought it was all such a laugh, because— _

_"Daddy?" he remembered. And. Red and gold. Red and gold and black._

_Red. And black._

_And._

_._

…

**….**

**_?_**

* * *

"_Are you __**scared**__?_" someone was asking, and he instinctively bared his teeth in his nastiest grin, but no, come to think of it, that wasn't a gloating voice after all.

It was kind of…stunned. And worried. J drew a breath that shuddered into his chest. He didn't like being scared. He _did not like being scared._ But what was even worse? Was scaring people. People who hadn't done anything wrong.

"Not really," he lied. It wasn't his best effort in the arena of lying. He was actually a pretty good liar. Given time to mentally rehearse, at least. But. Well. He didn't have that much practice pretending _not_ to be scared. He was much better at faking scared-ness. His voice as he told this lie did a shaking thing that he had been aware voices did but it sounded really strange from him and this really wasn't working. He was flat on his back with his heart going like a marathon and, and _hyperventilating. _Because. Because _something bad _that he _didn't know what _and he was not going to whimper. Not.

The worst part was he was completely sure something bad had already happened, and was probably going to go on happening, and it was _his fault, _and he didn't know what he could do about it but he could at least not whimper.

"M'okay," he tried, with a lot less shaking. If he could just get his breath normal. He could fake it. He couldn't remember what he was so scared of but the worried person probably needed help. He could help. He was supposed to make people smile. Any second now he'd get up, and make sure they didn't have anything to worry about.

Something—_someone_—moved sharply in the undefined space outside his eyelids, and he flinched back against the—pillow?—eyes flying open in the now-desperate need to _see_ his doom coming at him, but all he got was a blurred silhouette _looming_ before the _blinding spears of light_ slammed into his corneas with such agony that they were closed again and buried in the crook of his elbow before J was personally consulted on the matter.

Not good. Notgoodnotgood, and then there was a hand closing on his shoulder and _no._

He wrenched free, scrambled back over the pillow until his back hit a wall, which was sub-optimal in terms of the way a little voice in his head started screaming about being _cornered _and _blind _but at least he hadn't fallen off anything and now he had something at his back. It was cool and solid and non-threatening.

Only after the maneuver was complete did it occur to him that grabbing-person was, logically, probably worried-person, and therefore possibly not out to get him. Was that panicking? He wasn't exactly renowned for thinking things through but having his ability to _think at all_ just _leave_ like that…great, now he was scared of being scared. This was just _hilarious_. (Actually it wasn't nearly as funny as it should be, which was like half the problem.)

Water running for a few seconds, in another room. Voices. He couldn't make out any words. That worried note was in one of them, but no one sounded scared.

"Panic is bad," he said. His voice didn't shake but it was very small, like he'd spent a long time crying. He didn't remember crying.

"A little not good." Cautious agreement was…pretty non-threatening. Not as good as his nice cool wall, but something. "Uh, you okay?"

It was such a stupid question J just huddled there against his wall, shaking slightly, for several rib-battering heartbeats before letting out a thin, hysterical titter. "_Okay?_" he repeated. "_Okay?_"

"Alright, sorry, dumb question," said the voice. Which was _Ed's_, he realized suddenly, with a sharp release of tension.

"Ed," he said. Eddie was okay. Trustworthy. And he'd barely been there at the circus at all—

Every muscle in his body seized up.

The circus.

He was going to throw up.

Nope. Nothing in his stomach.

"Hey, J, buddy, there's a bucket right here, it's fine." Hand on his back, drawing hesitant circles and turning him toward the bucket, but J shook his head and pulled away, getting his back safely against the wall again. Gagging over with; no mess. He must not've eaten recently. He might not ever eat again.

For a moment he flashed to how hunger strikes were dealt with in Arkham, but he wasn't there, no matter how much it felt like it, because Eddie was here. But—he remembered—

Cautiously, he bent his elbow enough to partly expose his left eye, and squinted. Someone had turned down the lights, but they still hurt. Ed was turned away from him, fussing with the bucket. J swallowed. His throat was very dry. "Look at me," he demanded.

Instant compliance. Worried, button-bright eyes fixed on the tiny sliver of his. J sank back against the wall in relief. No staring pits. No gore. He let his burning left eye slide shut and buried his face in his own elbow again. "You're alive."

"Yeah, I—we got out fine, J. The ones that were after you got smaller doses, and we knocked the rest out long enough to grab you and grab the most important stuff. Basil's down breaking the rest out of impound with some of the guys."

J fixed on the part of that he understood. "Basil's back?"

"Yeah, he turned up while we were all freaking out about your _coma_." There was a note of accusation in the last word, a sort of _do you understand how much you worried us?_ It was comforting in its familiarity.

"Gotta get him t'stay this time," J asserted blurrily.

"He thinks we just want him for his powers."

"Don't forget his scint'lating acting abilities."

"Heh. Those too." Ed's chuckle was halfhearted, and he followed it with a sigh. "I'm going to go get you some water, okay? And I'll tell everyone you're awake. And okay. More or less."

"Wait!" J sat up straighter, giving up the pressure of the wall in his urgency at being left alone. "What _happened?_"

"Oh. Oh, hell, J, I'm sorry."

"What?"

"Ssh, nothing that bad, just listen. You remember our base in the old middle school? We got hit by SWAT. Got a bullshit tip about drug dealers holing up there."

"Yeah?" That sounded familiar. "They…had grenades?"

"Uh-huh. They blew up Jon's lab with you in it."

J rolled his shoulders a little. "I got blown up?"

This didn't feel like that, exactly—his skin felt a little too tight, sort of like it had when he was healing from the acid, and there were definite bruises and a lot of small, stinging-sharp new cuts that had to be from all that shattered glass he suddenly remembered hearing, but none of the all-over ache that usually came with the sharp _press _of an explosion knocking a few hundred pounds of air into you all at once. And no burns.

"No, ugh, sorry, you know me, I am the worst at communicating, why did you wake up on my shift. You did _not_ get blown up," Ed clarified, over the sound of an opening door.

"Though not for lack of trying by _certain idiots_." The new voice almost made J open his eyes again, but he decided to save that up. He knew the voice; it was Harvey. If another Harvey started talking too, then…he wasn't sure what. But he couldn't get the image of Harvey as a two-headed sideshow attraction out of his head and wasn't about to look yet, just in case. He kept expecting to hear a creaking rope. "They think they're after meth cookers, see a chem lab, and don't think 'gosh, this room might blow up if things get _smashed and set on fire._'"

"But Strawman was _not_ cooking meth, and therefore all they did was release three different powerful psychoactive substances into the air," Enigma concluded. "So basically, what happened is you got hit with Jon's very-scary stuff, mixed with a few of his other things. Which is why the screaming and the panicking, if you were wondering whether you'd gone crazier."

The fear gas. Yeah. Jon liked to use that when he went out alone, especially. The Owl controlled his guys with fear; all you had to do to get most of them to break and run was be scarier. Jon was really, really good at being scary without hurting anyone, but even he wouldn't be able to scare off hardened criminals without the gas. Wafting a weaker dose over a group they were all going up against was a handy way to undermine morale, too, since he'd come up with antidotes to protect _them_.

One problem. "Doesn't work on me," Jokester mumbled.

It never had. Made him a tad bit jumpy, like _way_ too much caffeine at once, and made anything at all funny shoot up to absotively-posilutely-gosh-darn-hi_lar_ious, but it'd never made him _scared._

"You've never been given a lethal dose before," said Harvey practically. "Not to mention the soporific putting you under while you processed it. You should be fine, if you give it some time."

J swallowed, and nodded, and grappled with the immediate outrageous fear that he would never stop feeling afraid. If that did happen, he would _learn to cope_. Jon did it. It was a thing people could do. He could be brave. He _could._

"Mister J?" said a voice like pale honey, and suddenly there was nothing in his head but the cold kick of the gun in his hand, the high, ringing laughter, those bluish-greenish eyes blinking in bewildered innocence.

Why would he do that. _Why?_

"—hey,_ hey_, you big dumb eggplant, I'm here, come on, it's okay, you're okay."

It was Harley, her sweet voice and her careful little hands, trying to get him to uncurl out of the ball of misery he'd become, but he knew it couldn't be.

"Whatever you're thinking, honeybunches, it's not true."

"Unless you're thinking you married somebody who calls you names like 'honeybunches,' in which case I'm afraid it's completely real," said Ed. Which threw off J's crying jag a little, because he was pretty sure Ed had been real, but…hang on, wait… "Hey, he was getting hysterical about random things earlier," Ed defended himself. "He is drugged to his purely-proverbial gills. It could be anything."

"I do not believe for one _second_ that you honestly think he's curled up weeping over my cutesy nicknames," Harley said, and by this point J had raised his head and opened his eyes. Harley still had one hand on his shoulder where she was kneeling next to him, but she was twisted around the better to hiss at Ed.

"Q," he said. It came out breathy but mostly calm, and he had all her attention right away. His hand was on her wrist, and she was _so_ real. "You're okay." He swallowed. "Where's El?"

"She's okay too, J," his wife assured him, other hand coming up to run through his hair. "She's just downstairs."

Hearing it wasn't enough. "Can she come up?"

Doctor Q bit her lip. "Can you promise not to start crying again? She's already scared enough."

"I'm okay," he promised, and he was, because Harley was real, and sweet as she was she wouldn't be acting like this if he'd hurt Ella. "I just need to see her."

Harley contemplated him narrowly for a few seconds before giving a sharp nod. Harvey, hovering near the end of the bed where a door hung half-open, promptly dispatched himself to the fetching, and came back less than a minute later, with their little girl perched in the crook of one arm.

Her face lit up, and she took a flying leap from Croc's arms onto the mattress, and half-bounced, half-scampered up to her parents. "You're okay, Daddy?" she asked, and without waiting for his answer reached out to trace one of the tear-tracks on his cheek.

Swallowing, J beamed. "I'm already starting to be swell, Princess Sugarplum," he promised.

Ella considered this, accepted it, nodded. "Good," she declared, and flopped down against his side, tugging impatiently on her mother's arm. Harley let herself be tugged, and Ella gave a contented little sigh as

"Looks like we can clear out then," said Ed, though he was actually walking _away_ from the door—oh, he'd left a book on the bedside table. Must have been reading while he took his turn waiting on J.

"Hey," J asked, as Harley's head sank onto his shoulder and he let his cheek lie against her hair, "what's a surefire way to get into the circus?"

Ed gave a little huff, sharing a speaking look across the mattress at Harvey, who was placing a glass of water carefully on the less-rickety table on that side. "Buy a ticket, J; you asked me that one already."

Heh.

The bed was a queen, and tucked together in the middle around Ella they seemed to have simply oodles of space. Jokester and Harlequin shared a look, and matching wicked grins, and then simultaneously turned and _grabbed_.

"No, no no no _no,_" Eddie insisted, but in a longsuffering way that was accompanied by zero serious attempts to shake off Harley's grip, and was clearly just to keep up appearances. Once she'd successfully tugged him down, though, he kicked off his shoes, swung his feet up, and made himself comfortable.

Harvey didn't say anything, and put up even less of a fight, but sank down onto the bed with a sort of resignation. J kept hold of his shirt as a precaution as he snuggled back into place and fixed Waylon, just inside the door and out of reach, with an expectant look.

"I'm not gonna participate in breaking your bed," Waylon growled, folding his mighty arms. Since he'd weighed near about four hundred pounds at last count, he might have a good point. He generally had a pretty good sense of what furniture could and could not handle him.

"Air hug!" Ella announced, flinging her arms wide and bopping J in the nose. Best punch to the nose _ever._

Waylon cracked a smile, the kind that showed teeth, and gave a less exuberant but wholehearted return version of the gesture. Their little girl had the whole team wrapped around her adorable little fingers, didn't she just. Awwwww. "I'll go tell the rest of your devoted fanbase that you're fine," Waylon dismissed himself, entirely amused.

"Tell Pam too!" J called after him, which netted him four laughs, including the one from Ella who probably didn't quite get the joke.

Harvey had once again been silent, which was not to be borne, and J made a revenge attack in the form of a tickle. Harvey was down to his shirtsleeves, which left him vulnerable, since he wasn't ticklish on the stomach or under the chin or anywhere that didn't come in pairs. Their resident lawyer doubled up, hooting and burbling with a total loss of dignity, but slapping J's hands away instead of counterattacking or trying to pin him down, which might be one of the perks of a sickbed, but also maybe not.

Harvey finally escaped by sliding off the side of the bed onto the floor, and J pulled away from his best girls enough to lean after him. "You had better not be thinking like it's your fault I got hurt," he whispered.

Harvey looked away, which was a ridiculously blatant tell. Clearly he wasn't even trying; Harvey was a great liar when he tried. "I let you handle them alone."

"Which was my idea, and which I was doing just fine, until I let myself get cornered in the drug lab by guys I _knew_ were throwing concussion grenades at me. That's on me, and SWAT. It's not even on Jon, let alone you." He held out his hand, and waited. Some gestures, you could force people to accept, especially people who had trouble believing in offers of affection. But others, you really really couldn't.

Harvey sighed a little, and looked up, and smiled. "You'll have to tell him that," he said, and took J's hand.

"I will," J agreed, hauling his buddy back into the snuggle pile, his side plastered once again along Harley's. Jon was a ridiculous person to hug, all bones and uncertainty, but if he came up here he was getting press-ganged too, and if not J would catch him later. Ella sunk her weight into him pointedly, as if to direct her dad-pillow to stop squirming. _Awwww._

He glanced left to Harley, who now had Ed slumped against her with his head on her shoulder and looking halfway to asleep, and found she was looking toward the door again.

He followed the look, and there was Jason hovering in the doorway, not hiding well at all how worried he was and how he'd needed to see with his own peepers that J was awake and alive and no crazier than usual. (It was adorable, and really funny in a way that was only a little heartbreaking, how bad Jason was at hiding his feelings any way but going full-on Talon. Go big or go home, that was their Jaybird.) J grinned. It was mutual, because there the kid was, not smashed up or broken at _all_, let alone cold and still.

"Hey, sonny boy," he said. "Come get yer cuddle on, huh?"

"Oh god _no,_" Jason groaned, shaking his head at them. "I think you've got this covered."

"Plenty of space left," J argued, indicating with his feet, and then looked plaintive and ailing until Jason grumbled deep in his throat and dropped down to sit in the neighborhood of his left leg. There was in fact plenty of space, what with him and Harley in a half-sit against the wall, and J had to reach a little to press his bare foot up against Jason's knee.

"Oh, not just _in_ the bed, you're gonna play human octopus," Jason complained, but then he flopped over sideways so J's calf lay straight along his back, so it must be okay. "Don't _do_ that, you asshole," he muttered. "Everyone was worried sick. Again."

J smiled. The shivery feeling down inside was still there, but it was starting to fade, and in the meantime he had warm, alive, _safe_ family all around him. He wished he could fit everybody he cared about into one room. "Sorry," he said quietly. Harley's hand uncurled from Ella to give his leg an affectionate squeeze, and he felt his smile finally coming back for real.

If his nightmare meant anything, it was that he was afraid…not just of his people getting hurt, not just of watching them suffer, but that they'd get damaged and it would be _his fault_. He'd never wanted to be a leader, didn't like the idea of bossing people around or being responsible for what they did, but as Edna had said the very first time he complained, if he wanted to not be ringleader he was doing a _very bad job_ at working to get what he wanted.

He'd talked Ed and Harvey into this; Harley had pretty much followed him into it; Waylon wouldn't have been putting himself in Owlman's way if he hadn't fallen in with J, and part of him shared Harley's concern that by keeping Jason with them instead of finding him a safe family a long way away to relearn _normal_ with they were just taking advantage. And the danger _Ella_ was in, as their daughter….

But except for Ella, they'd all made their own choices. It was unfair to them to hold himself responsible, and…whatever happened, he knew he wouldn't ever stand there and laugh at their tears. Talk about ridiculous fears.

_You've always been the nightmare,_ whispered the voice that was not exactly Owlman's, and he shivered a little, and held his family tight.

* * *

_**A/N:** Whew! ^^ Happy Birthday, Cirque de Triomphe! I laboured upon this behemoth for twenty-two months to bring it forth alive. Please tell me this was not a terrible mistake!  
_


	55. Inside Reality's Maze

'Trapped Inside Reality's Maze'

**_A/N:_**_ And to return briefly to the time between chapter one and chapter thirty-nine…_

* * *

Grayson crouched in his hiding place, waiting. Waiting for his enemy to appear—knowing he would. Knowing the resources he had left behind were enough for the man who had trained him to make his escape, at least from the cell if not from the building. Knowing that, much as he wished it otherwise, Bruce Wayne would not sit cowering within his prison from the threat of his former servant, stooping from the sky to rend at him.

It had been three hours. It might be another three, or thirty-three, before his prey emerged.

He was prepared to wait.

The Crucible had been built to be inescapable, perched three-quarters of the way up a canyon wall, on a broad lip of cliff many would have refused to call more than a particularly deep ledge, with the red stone vaulting upward behind it and dropping away before. Deliveries and departures took place only by helicopter. This remoteness had not, of course, much inconvenienced the Ultraman during his first breakout, and in his second, several years later, unable to free himself from the power-suppressing cuffs he had used them to catch the skids of a departing helicopter, swung himself up into the cockpit, successfully fought the pilot for possession, and once again flown away.

Everyone had been very impressed. Let it not be said the Kryptonian had been no more than his freakish genetics and the power of a yellow sun.

Now Richard Grayson clung to the stone, fifty feet up. He was screened from easy view from the prison below by a narrow ledge of his own, and fixed to the wall above it by deeply-sunk pitons so he could lean out without concern for balance.

From this vantage point, he could watch almost the entire perimeter. There was no helicopter in residence. Even if Owlman escaped the prison through the small section of wall blocked by the angle, he could only then move away from the building without entering Grayson's field of vision by going straight over the edge at one specific point, in which scenario he would trigger the motion sensors left there against just such an eventuality.

Unless the foundations the government had sunk into the stone led into hidden tunnels that curved out and away to ground level—unlikely, in an installation constructed specifically for inaccessibility; both Luthor and the architect whose occasional forays into vigilantism went under the name of Life Ward had consulted on the initial construction, and they were neither of them idiots or cowards—Owlman was not getting away from him.

Though oh, he hoped he tried.

As the fourth hour drew near its close and dawn approached, the canyon echoed with a sound like muffled thunder. A wall near the lip of the canyon had burst outward, sending debris and dust raining down over the edge. It would seem that the Owl had discarded subtlety entirely.

Grayson _dropped_, jumpline paying out behind him at nearly terminal velocity before it started to slow him, just in time to keep his legs from shattering when he reached the roof, and the minor damage he did incur on impact melted away even as he ran to intercept. The knife in his hand seemed to have its own heartbeat. Never had he ached like this to shed blood.

He reached the edge of the roof, and looked down on the familiar profile through the settling dust. Leapt, a one-handed vault that sent him swinging feetfirst toward his target, and watched the man who had made himself into the essence of fear, who had graven the image of his power into Grayson as into a block of wood, watched him realize too late even to turn around in time to matter. He wore no armor now, bore no better weapon than cudgel stolen from some guard; he was at the mercy which he had done everything in his power to train out of being—

And then, Grayson thought there had been another explosion, for he was thrown back by a force that shattered every bone in his right arm and reverberated across his whole body, and slammed him into the ground with rib-splintering force.

But there had been no sound, and all the impact had been at that one point of incredible agony just below his elbow, and when he opened his eyes there was no sign of further destruction, and Owlman was still standing where he had been in the moment of his attack, undisturbed.

With another.

The figure looming above him through the dust, standing at Owlman's right hand, bore familiar chiseled features and artfully tousled hair that should be, that everyone _knew_ to be, a long way from here, trapped in a cage in the heart of a grim red sun, under the guardianship of the alien organization that called itself the Golden Lights. Even if he had escaped so quickly and returned to Earth, what would he have been doing inside the Crucible, on this night of all nights?

"_How?_" Grayson asked, through lungs that could barely inflate, half the ribs around them snapped apart. One of the dependencies he had never been able to lose was that on oxygen.

The impossible figure seemed to understand or, if he misunderstood, still answered the question he'd meant. "Ultraman's clone," he sneered. "I heard you coming when you were still halfway up the cliff."

_Clone_, Grayson thought, and that much made sense even if little else did. As the dust began to settle he could see the figure was smaller than it should be, the lines of the face softer. _Uncompleted_ clone, no less. He had sensation in his fingers again, and reached through the undifferentiated agony of his arm to twitch them, wondering where his weapon had fallen. His left arm was broken in only three places, but it was trapped under him.

A bare foot landed on the digits with the force of an avalanche. "Don't even think about it."

"Boy," Owlman's voice was as cool as ever, but lacked the hardness Grayson remembered from reprimands in his Talon days. "You're wasting time."

"Sorry." The clone glanced back down at Grayson, gave a little twitch to his shoulders, and then drew back one bare foot in a lazy kick that sent Grayson sailing out over the abyss, unable to even try to save himself, with even his functioning muscles tugging at bones too fractured to move as they should.

"And that," he heard Wayne add, still without enough cold menace, "was even more wasteful."

Grayson knew without elaboration that he meant they should have relieved him of his equipment first. As he fell, he had long seconds to watch the escaping duo, the clone with his enhanced strength of arm sending a cable liberated from somewhere within the prison complex whirring across the hundred foot span of the canyon, biting deep into the stone on the far side with some affixed blade.

The clone was the first onto the wire, swinging hand over hand up the steep incline. Once he reached the far side, braced his feet against the cliff wall, and launched himself the rest of the way up to ground level in one long, powerful jump, Richard watched the distant figure he had come to kill bend to follow. Hand over hand along the wire, to where the clone was waiting with another rope to haul him up.

No one had come from the prison to recapture them. Grayson found this disappointing.

Then the ground hit, and he knew nothing for a long time.

* * *

**_A/N: _**_I mentioned the Crucible is in Colorado, right? ^^ No specific real canyon is intended. I couldn't find the perfect one, and decided that given how many made-up cities and countries we're working with here, I can make up a canyon. It's a good bit smaller than the Grand Canyon, but still on the intimidatingly large end of the spectrum. _

_Life Ward, btw, is the moderately obscure Superman villain Deathtrap, aka security consultant Carl Draper; I feel like he'd attain more prominence as a specialist in locking up Ultraman. He may or may not be the mascot of his own security company.  
_


	56. Not For Publication

'Not For Publication'

_**A/N:** Warning for gross humor at a horrible person's expense?_

* * *

It had taken Luthor years to even think of inducting Lois into this 'League of the Rhine' network of his, which was annoying enough since it was evidently meant at least as much as an information-sharing enterprise as it was for the coordination of vigilante combat resources; and then at least a year more for him to actually _do_ it. She'd known he was biting his tongue on something, but not what. She thought it was pretty rich of him to keep grumbling over her lack of trust for him as wealthy businessman, when he was so distrustful of her ability as reporter to keep her mouth shut.

Pun intended.

Be that as it may, ever since she'd joined the League her every introduction to the other members had come ringed about with reminders and cautions about confidentiality and how important it was to various people's wellbeing that she not publish their private information in the _Planet._ Which was insulting, but at least helped keep temptation at bay.

She was in Gotham for the day on a completely different story, but she had several spare hours in her schedule and Alex had arranged her contact with the Gotham Circus. They'd apparently felt themselves in much less danger letting a reporter see their lair than she would put herself in by appearing with them in public, so she'd been given directions to an address at which she could 'enjoy their hospitality.'

This invitation turned out not to be false advertising. After a brief introduction on arrival to The Crocodile (Mr. Jones had, apparently, made the cheese danishes she was offered on arrival; a man of many talents) and the Strawman, who was very pleasant if a little shy, both men had departed on unspecified business and she'd been left alone with the Jokester and the Red Hood, and they'd sat down with coffees in a somewhat shabby living room in the dilapidated three-story brownstone the Circus evidently called home. (Lois had not yet found the right moment to ask whether they rented, owned, or squatted in the place.)

The two men had pointed out the most comfortable armchair for Lois and themselves each taken a cushion of the sofa facing it, sitting far enough apart that a third person could have squeezed between, but not leaning against the arms. Red Hood, with his mask off, turned out to be in his early twenties, dark-haired and good-looking in a way that fell _just_ short of 'striking,' except when his eyes sharpened with emotion. He had given his name as 'Jason,' no surname, and she was sure he was carrying at least one concealed weapon, though it was well-concealed enough she didn't know where.

Jokester, in contrast, was boisterous, gregarious, warm, and after about twenty minutes in his company it was surprisingly easy to forget that he had a face like some burgeoning special effects technician had gone to town with the sculpting putty on an abnormally wide-mouthed puppet, and coated the result liberally in white latex paint.

In all likelihood, everything they could possibly say would be off the record, but in this position and in light of her personal levels of interest, Lois couldn't help but think of this as an interview.

A nice, relaxed one, mind you, not one of the fierce interrogations she'd been known to conduct trying to wring a particular piece of information out of an unwilling source, but an interview all the same.

In Jokester's eyes, it appeared to be story time. The Red Hood had taken a while to relax, but now that he had, he was slumped bonelessly over his half of the sofa, grinning all over his face as his mentor finished recounting an event involving aardvarks, honey, and thirteen ninjas surprised in the bath and wearing nothing but towels. It was remarkable how different this boy seemed from the reserved, judgmental youth she'd met an hour ago. Lois had finished her coffee five minutes ago, but been far too entertained by the story to do more than set the empty mug down on the dented coffee table and forget it.

"I can top that," declared the Red Hood, as soon as they were done laughing and declaring Jokester a dreadful fibber.

"You think my story is too ridiculous to even have happened, and you still think you can top it?"

"Yeah. For one thing, mine totally did happen, and you know it because you're the star."

"Oh goody," said the clown. It was hard to tell whether he intended it as irony or was totally sincere.

"Go on," prompted Lois. "I'm the only one who doesn't know this story now, loop me in."

Jason grinned. It was more than a little like a smirk. "Okay, so there's this one time, it's autumn and there's a really killer flu bug going around, and J catches it."

"_Oh_ no," interrupted Jokester, grimacing. Apparently that was all he needed to identify the tale.

Red Hood turned to him, still smirking. "What, this is a great story."

"So far this is a boring story," their guest pointed out, for which the Red Hood stretched around the coffee table to kick her gently in the ankle. He could not deny, however, that 'the story of that one time Jokester got the flu' was not particularly compelling.

The man himself stretched himself over the back of the sofa with an extended moan, his spine cracking. "Hey. Contrary to rumor, I _am_ actually capable of embarrassment, kiddo."

"This is a _great_ story," Jason reiterated, and turned back to Lois. "_So_, J has the flu, and Harley's ordered him to go to bed and stay there. But then word comes in of this massive raid the Owl's leading on the Cauldron. The Circus has _got_ to be there—obligations, people to protect, all kinds of reasons. Only a few of them are even in town, at the time. And if J doesn't go, somebody _else_ has to keep the Owl busy while everything else goes down, and he can't have _that_, so up he gets, and out he goes.

"He looks just the same as always, cuz, y'know, he can't get any _paler_, and he wore a bandana so you couldn't see how much he was sweating. So there he is, sick as a dog and faking for all he's worth, lures the Owl into a trap that keeps him down for a good eighty seconds. And then just when old birdface is getting out and coming at him, he _sways_, and Owlman's like, 'I haven't even hit you yet.'"

His imitation of the villain's intonation was uncannily accurate even with no effort to imitate his actual voice, and even in what was billed as a humorous story Lois was intrigued by this insight into Gotham battle dynamics. (Owlman's capacity for cracking very dry jokes in combat wasn't as surprising as it possibly should have been; but then, she'd spied on Syndicate meetings before, and heard the man being sarcastic at his allies' expense.)

Jokester chimed in. "And I said, 'You're not gonna, either,' which was definitely not some of my best repartee; I was sick, cut me some slack."

Red Hood rolled his eyes and took back the narrative. "So they jump around for a bit, all projectiles and split-second dodges. J gets him with the joy buzzer for a couple of seconds, but the Owl's getting smirkier and smirkier because he's realizing J's off his game, and ten minutes into the fight he's basically just kicking J around the square."

"Ooh." Lois winced in sympathy, and Jokester waved it off with a smile.

"At some point he's going to learn not to play with his food, and then we'll _really_ have problems," Jason averred. "So the only good thing was, J was definitely keeping him busy. Until suddenly the bastard realizes that's _why_ his opponent isn't making a break for it like he normally would after taking that many hits, so he knocks him down again, and takes his last weapon off him, and steps on his chest, right here." Jason gestured to the soft spot just under the base of the sternum, over the diaphragm, where one put one's hands when providing CPR.

Lois' wince this time was considerably more violent. Between an exposé she'd done on police custody deaths, and dealing with the aftermath of far too many instances of Ultraman, she knew more about traumatic asphyxia and how easy it was to inflict accidentally than she had ever wanted to.

"Don't worry," Jokester jumped in again. "He didn't keep me down long enough to turn blue. I slapped my last firecracker against his ankle and wriggled away in the distraction."

"Right," agreed the Red Hood. "J wriggles out again. The evacuation is starting to finish up, and the Owls aren't making a great showing. Owlman is getting pissed. He backs J up against a curb, then makes him have to jump back to dodge, and he kind of screws up his footing on the landing because the height changed and his reflexes were shot."

"He comes at me," Jokester narrated. "I'm windmilling my arms to stay upright, don't have a trick ready, don't have a guard up."

"And then," Red Hood says with relish, "J _spews_."

"Spews?" Lois repeated, just to make sure she had it right.

"Looses his lunch. Tosses his cookies. All over _him_." Red Hood raised his hands and then waved them down his own body to indicate a coverage zone from just above the nose down to somewhere around waist height. "It's bright green, because he'd been chugging Gatorade trying to stay hydrated, and it's just…" he pulled a face. "_Nasty._"

"Ooh," Lois said, knowing she was pulling a face of her own. Couldn't help feeling a shred of sympathy for _anyone_, even Owlman, getting vomited in the face. Couldn't help the hilarity pulling at the corners of her mouth, either.

Red Hood grinned, big and white. He had very straight teeth. "So Owlman, he just looks…horrified. You can't see most of his face, and what you can is covered in vomit, but this level of _revulsion_, right? Like anyone would feel, but times twenty, because he's not the kind of person who deals with bodily fluids. I mean, the guy wouldn't even wipe up his own blood if he cut himself shaving, and suddenly this happens to him. In _public. _I think he thought he was having a horrible nightmare."

"With me laughing my head off as a soundtrack," Jokester put in. "I wasn't really feeling up to much else by that point."

"And then somebody's camera shutter clicked," Red Hood said, "and Owlman went _ballistic_. Whoever it was got away, though the picture's never surfaced, but by the time Owlman got back, the raid was scattered and all the targets had rabbited."

"And thus the day was saved by projectile vomiting. And Harley handcuffed me to the bed for three days."

Lois repressed a slightly off-color joke about handcuffs and beds. Red Hood was a bad influence. "Did that keep you there?" she asked instead, dryly. He was fairly widely famed as an escape artist.

"Well, no. But I didn't want to tick off the missus any worse, so I didn't pick them that often, either."

Jason sniggered.

"So where were you in all this?" Lois asked him, curious because the blow-by-blow was detailed enough he'd probably been an eye witness, but he hadn't mentioned what had kept him out of the fight when Jokester was so overmatched, so whatever it was had to have been fairly challenging, and yet still allowed him to spare some attention for Jokester's battle.

The easy grin ran off the Red Hood's face like water. He looked aside. Picked at the unravelling end of his sleeve.

"I. Well, I was Talon then, so I was dislocating Enigma's shoulder for part of it."

Lois's hand rose up to cover her mouth, as though she could call back the question asked in ignorance—not that she _would_, if it meant not gaining this piece of the puzzle. It had won her a bit of truth, and truth was the only true form of beauty, but that didn't mean she liked upsetting her sources, especially ones she liked.

"You might as well know," Jason shrugged. "Luthor already does. He helped check me over, make sure I didn't have a killswitch or anything."

Lois let out a tiny huff. "Normally I'd call him a rat for keeping secrets from me, but this one wasn't his to tell."

The young vigilante shrugged, looking at his boots. "We don't spread it around—I hurt a lot of people, back then; it's not good for our group rep—but it's not really a secret."

"Well, I'm hardly going to print this," Lois assured him, and some relief spread over the young man. She narrowed her eyes at him. "It was you," she realized aloud. "Six years ago, when the word underground went from suspecting Wayne to being _certain_ it was him—that was when you changed sides." He'd been Talon. He'd been close enough to the man to _know._ "You could testify," she said.

He shook his head. "I wouldn't be enough on my own. He'd have to be pinned with good physical evidence."

"And we won't give Jaybird up unless it's a pretty sure thing," Jokester threw in. Lois glanced at him to find his attention fixed disconcertingly on her.

He'd slipped into the background with surprising ease, especially for a chronic attention hound like himself. A stage technique, maybe, for an actor left on stage but outside the active part of the scene, blending in with the set. It wasn't that she'd forgotten in the least that he was there, but until he'd stepped back in with that uncompromising thrust to his long chin and flash of wild challenge in his eye that reminded her that no one, even Luthor, considered this man to be strictly sane, she'd been able to ignore him.

"It's more than that," she told him frankly. Putting the Red Hood on a witness stand _was_ putting him in much better-aimed crosshairs than he no doubt lived under anyway, and she could admit that throwing someone in his position—especially six years ago, god, he'd have been just a kid—on the mercy of the media at large was like throwing them to lions. But a great deal of the dynamic of Gotham had fallen into place for her, now that she knew the Red Hood had once been Talon. So long as he did nothing with his information, it was potential blackmail.

The Circus couldn't afford to initiate a legal process they didn't expect to win, but Wayne also couldn't afford formal accusations about his double life to go on record. He relied more on plausible deniability than real _secrecy_, these days, but every layer of deniability was important.

They controlled him. Just slightly, and the balance had to be so, _so_ delicate, but the existence of Jason Todd was one of the threads holding the Owl in check.

She guessed that was justification enough for silence.

"If I can guarantee you a serious hearing," she said, because _this_ was her specialty, where she'd cut her investigative eyeteeth. Corruption, distortion, hidden millionaire agendas, buried crimes. "Will you consider testifying? We could take him down. The kinds of things he's done, if we do it right, we could _destroy_ him."

Judging by the look on the young man's face, he had trouble even imagining a world in which Bruce Wayne was not a preeminent threat. But the Jokester's eyes held something lean and hungry, and as he laughed out loud it sounded a little too much like a hyena's bark for comfort.

Red Hood shot him an uncertain look, then back at Lois. "You don't seem like the type to make guarantees you can't back up," he said. "So…yeah. Just…he owns most of the cops and over half the judges, okay? In Gotham. He owns a lot of people outside, too. Be careful."

And if Lois had held any doubts about the basic human decency of someone who'd spent his childhood a leashed killer, they melted away at the genuineness of that awkward worry. He might have a hard time grasping the possibility of a world without Owlman, but surely nobody was better qualified to assess the risk of assassination she would face, if she investigated too rashly.

Lois nodded. Red Hood smiled, and Jokester chortled, the dangerous predator sunk back under his usual ebullient good will. "I promise." She paused a moment, as something occurred to her, and smiled back. "Hey," she asked. "Is it okay if I publish the vomit story?"


	57. Beware Green Eyes

'Beware Green Eyes'

_**A/N: **If I'd done the math, you might have gotten this last week and the flu incident today. It's April Fools'! My parents got married twenty-eight years ago today. Longest-running prank ever, besides of course the city of Bielfield. ;D Anyway, the saga of Grayson continues where we left it after 'With Tongue of Wood.' Warning yet again for brutal, though temporary, injury. Sorry, these Talon boys just have a deeply screwed-up relationship with violence._

_In addition to Europe, I have also never been to the state of Washington. I don't actually know much about their particular agricultural history, or its effects on their new-growth forests. My apologies if I have inaccurately projected too much New England across the continent._

_Deer hunting season is definitely autumn and winter, though._

* * *

Grayson's rash destruction of four aspirant bakery robbers had changed his situation—perhaps no one hunting him would hear of it, or perhaps they all would, and he must perforce assume the latter.

Although he had also destroyed the footage of his fight, his face might be still recorded on older security tapes, one he had not found. Now that he had tipped his hand, any pursuer that heard of the incident and connected it to him would know to look for quiet, multilingual young men working menial jobs. Any other job he took would call for far more dissemblance, and even then he would live in quiet terror of discovery.

He lingered on that latter point, remembering the crippling insomnia he had only just put behind him, more or less. Fear was like pain: it should not be allowed _control,_ but it existed to warn you. And while, for Talon's body, pain's warnings were often more than reality required…it was not paranoia, if everyone really was hunting you.

(He would never find another such place—the smell of baking, of walnuts and cinnamon and rosewater, Dumitrescu's grumbling, Alina Dalca's tolerant amusement, Antonin sending him off at night with unsold bread and cakes.)

It had been over a year, now, since he had left the Court's service. He had heard no hint of pursuit closing in, but he could never afford to assume it was not. Even had he not known the silence of an owl's wings, complacency was death. Or worse. Probably worse.

And it had felt so _right,_ he realized. The burst of violence, the victory. Like lemonade on his tongue. He had killed, since his flight fourteen months ago. Animals for food, and two humans in self-defense. He had killed, swift and clean, and it had been cause for discomfort or relief, or both, and nothing more. But he had not _fought,_ and he had not realized until now that he missed it. Was that, too, a part of himself?

He thought of the Jokester again. The man had never been precisely normal, but they had remade him, Talon and the Owl. Cut him apart and he had come back stranger, stronger, less sane. Less man and more creature. Owlman had given him the seeming of a clown and he had taken it, _owned_ it, kept laughing in Wayne's face as he used what he'd been given—made into—for his own purposes.

Grayson could certainly never be that laughing child again. Even if he could guess what a circus-raised Grayson his age would be like, he could barely impersonate him, let alone _become_ him.

He met his own eyes in the speckled mirror of the Russian hostel's communal bathroom. When he stopped trying to dissemble, all his camouflage dropped away, and there was only this: shaggy hair, still lips, flat eyes in which even he could read nothing of his thoughts, though he knew them. He let his hand curl around an absent knife-hilt, and the shape looked as right as it felt. It could be the perching grip of a small bird, almost, but—always, the grasping talons of a hunter returned.

_This_ was his self.

There was more to him than this—he might have talons, but he was not one, would never be reduced so far again. Would not give up any of the scraps of humanity he had gathered, or cease his searching. And yet. This too was not for discarding. This was the shape of him.

He was not a member of society. Attempts to pretend otherwise were a waste of resources, risky and painful and _doomed_. Admit it, have done. So long as he remained fugitive, he could not live among humanity in peace, and perhaps he could never be content long with being stationary and peaceful, even if it were not denied him. The child he had been had been itinerant, after all, and the Talon bound to a single city. Given the choice, he would be the former.

But he was no longer a child, and could not expect that every part of him could be divided so cleanly in two, with one option to each. Talon had taken up far more than half his lifetime. The robin-boy had been in training for a trade, but it was not one you could ply while in hiding.

He had precisely one skillset. Best to put it to work.

It was less simple than merely making the decision, of course—even once he located some hubs of the mercenary trade and could begin establishing his credibility, he couldn't show his face carelessly, as that community was where he was most likely to be recognized, short of a gathering of Owlman's Society associates or the Wilson family reunion. (Supposing they had one.) Nor could he take many jobs at his actual skill level, or he'd gain too much reputation, and then the Owl might notice, and the same avenues which his clients used to contact him could be used to draw him into a trap.

This was always possible, and he scouted every meeting place thoroughly in advance, and generally gave the impression that he lived and breathed paranoia. But there were plenty of hitmen and spies in the world, and while those unattached to any particular organization tended to be either legends, legends in the making, or bottom feeders, he was content to impersonate bottom feeders. He'd never much cared what people thought of him.

As a freelancer, he didn't have the support of an organization to provide him with vehicles and safehouses, and the pay wasn't anything remarkable, especially considering the risks.

The pay as Talon, however, had been _nonexistent._ And as a freelancer, he got to _turn jobs down._

It was good he had excellent self-control, or he might have started rejecting commissions just for the rush of being able to do so, and that would have done nothing for his bank accounts.

He'd decided to be three freelancers, since it improved the chances of working steadily without creating a noteworthy pattern of competence. One of his identities was a woman—he was slim enough that with a full mask, light body armor concealing the lines of his torso, and a slight alteration to the way he moved, few people doubted him, and in many ways the female identity required the least pretense, because she spoke only when absolutely necessary, and was a specialist in close-range assassination.

She called herself Sable and rapidly became the best-remunerated of him, since Owlman was infinitely less likely to suspect a female operative of being his missing Talon—Bruce took a rather rigid view of gender; the Circus idiots had used it against him a few times—which meant Grayson could afford to hold back less. She put knives in a wide variety of backs and throats, or occasionally merely threatened to, and never accepted a contract involving children.

As David Teal, he had blonde hair and a practiced grin, and specialized in information retrieval—'I get in, get out, and they'll never know I was there'—and as Spin, whose real name was supposedly John Clock, was a competent marksman and skilled hand-to-hand fighter with a good grasp of security systems, who tended to be hired by groups needing a little extra muscle for some sort of heist. They liked him because he kept a level head, a close tongue, and his word, and he liked them because in those cases his fee was frequently set as a percentage of the take, and this was so much more the sort of arrangement you came to over a person rather than a weapon that, even when the job went poorly and his percentage was lower than his flat rate would have been, he was pleased.

Spin wore armor that gave him a heavier build than Grayson really had, and covered his face with a helmet, but decent mercenaries were allowed their eccentricities. Grayson liked that about the community.

He was attacked in his sleep several times, over the next few years. Two business rivals, an employer planning to save himself the mercenary's fee and thinking to catch him off-guard; once an enemy, by contract. Nothing personal.

It was a relief. The instincts that he had learned in childhood had proven themselves still with him, and he slept more easily having proven himself capable of self-defense at any level of consciousness. (The contract hit had come the closest to really challenging him, and he had had to kill the woman despite feeling no animosity, because she had seen him heal.)

In a lot of ways, nothing had changed. In a lot of ways, he would always be what he had been made into. But in all the ways that mattered, everything was different. He was a free agent. His name was Richard Grayson, even if he was the only one that used it, and he liked chocolate and popcorn, and yesterday he'd melted chocolate _onto _popcorn and that had been good, too, although it was both noisy and sticky and absolutely a terrible idea. No one could make him do anything he did not choose to do. The worst they could do was withhold payment and try to kill him.

(Well, hypothetically, they could hold and torture him, but no one had managed it yet.)

Tonight, he was picking his way through a forest in the state of Washington. David Teal's latest client was obviously paranoid, to request a meeting with a data specialist in the middle of nowhere, but the money was good without being good enough to be suspicious, and he respected paranoia. His scouting during the day had turned up nothing suspicious.

The agriculture in this area seemed to be mainly dairy farmers, whose operations must have once taken up more space—he was no expert in forestry, but he'd paid some attention to the subject in the years since his retreat to the Quetico park, and could see that much of this growth was new, cut through by aging, carelessly-built stone walls, and broken by the occasional surviving meadow. Or maybe it had been cropland, abandoned in favor of richer, flatter soil as agricultural technology changed. He did not care.

The _point_ was that his destination was a particular meadow, and he had reached it now. In deer-hunting season, there might have been any number of armed men prowling such a place, especially on a full-moon night like this: Grayson had learned as much shortly after his first return to the States, nineteen months since, to the tune of three rifle bullets to the back and half a dozen dead men, before realizing the ambush had been nothing of the kind, merely civilians so anxious to kill something that they fired at any hint of motion. He had to commend their ability to be silent when motionless, at least; he had not been on his guard, admiring the terrain, and failed to realize he was not alone until the rifles cracked.

But it was June, now, nearly five years to the day since he had left Talon behind him, and that should not be a concern.

The only human presence he could detect was waiting for him, on the grassy meadow ahead.

His client was wearing something cut like a military uniform, though not one Grayson recognized; some sort of black fatigues, marked with flashes of orange as though the wearer was concerned about being targeted by deer hunters even so far out of season, but there was a _sword_ strapped across his back. That wouldn't have been so much of a surprise if he'd been hired as Spin or Sable, but David Teal had never been anyone's backup before. Generally, if a lone mercenary was involved in a two-person data extraction/combat effort, it was as muscle, to cover a spy. But if you already had muscle, hiring a spy made just as much sense, really. Or perhaps they were both hirelings, and the other man had merely been engaged first, and deputized him.

He climbed the low tumbled line of stone just within the treeline that had been a halfhearted wall, letting the stones shift under his feet enough to make a little sound.

The client turned to face him.

White beard. Black eye patch. Blue eye.

_Slade Wilson_ was waiting for him, and somehow Grayson doubted that it was because he'd started dabbling in domestic espionage in his retirement, and gone free-market for his hacker.

He'd _known_ he should have worn a mask for this character, too. The smile hadn't been enough disguise.

A long heartbeat, as they watched each other—_I know you know I know who_, though what he'd been before would never have paused just to see and be seen—Grayson flung himself backward under the trees again. He doubted he would get away without fighting, not if Wilson had made such an effort to track him down—it would be stupid to run flat-out, when there could be ambushes waiting in any or every direction, and he'd only reach them winded—but he could refuse to fight on the ground the man had prepared. There were no orders binding him here this time, after all.

And he remembered the Wilsons' willingness to pour out bullets like water, even in their own home. Open terrain gave a ranged fighter the advantage.

He dove through bracken as shots rang out, then swung himself up among branches and crouched there silent. Waited for Wilson to come into sight, pursuing, and _jumped._

The old soldier was ready for him, but Grayson's momentum still knocked him off his feet, and they rolled, grappling, digging at one another for every iota of advantage. Grayson snatched for a knife sheathed at the back of Wilson's neck and received in reply a stunning headbutt that briefly broke his nose. Snorted hard to clear the blood that might otherwise harden and block his breathing, and gouged at the side of Wilson's throat with his thumb. He would have gone for the remaining eye, but it was on the opposite side; he could not quite reach.

A snatch for his hair came away with the yellow wig. Grayson took advantage of the opening left to deliver a skull-blow of his own, driving down onto the bridge of Wilson's nose with his forehead, even as his opponent got him in a leg lock and nearly pinned him down. He eeled free when the old soldier's natural instincts forced a flinch that cost focus, and for a second was the one on top—Slade jerked hard, delivered rapid successive blows to the groin and kidneys, the latter impressively powerful considering the angle, regained the advantage and pressed down again with his greater weight. Grayson repaid him with a chop to the side, just below the ribs.

His fingertips ghosted over the grip of one of Wilson's guns, which provoked instant response, twisting his wrist near breaking, and Grayson ignored that to take advantage of the imbalance it had caused; rolled them over hard and got his own right hand, for a few seconds, around the soldier's throat.

Even at his full growth, Grayson was not a large man, and this sort of brutal close-fighting was not one of the things he had been primarily trained for, but he was nevertheless well suited to it, because intimate hurts that most fighters no matter how stoic would instinctively cringe from gave him no pause. Wilson, who had known of his healing ability from their first fight but clearly underestimated its strength, rapidly assessed the advantage it was giving now, and slammed Grayson against the bole of the next tree their struggle carried them near, headfirst.

Talon's healing had never done anything to prevent that instant of total disorientation as his brain bounced in his skull, and Wilson used that moment to disentangle their limbs and rise to his feet.

Very deliberately, drew his sword, and by the time he was done Grayson was upright again, head trauma already almost entirely vanished, right hand on the hilt of the longest of his knives, sheathed at the small of his back.

He drew, knowing there had been a split second of vulnerability there that his opponent had not taken advantage of. Then looked up from his own long blade, black-coated so it would not catch the light and all but invisible under the color-stealing moon, to Wilson's longer one, a different weapon than the last but single-edged bright steel, just like that first night.

Here they were, again.

Bright steel, and that blue eye gouging into him.

Wilson had, he realized, been planning this fight for years. Hunting him. Waiting for their rematch. Grayson had known about the hunt, his still-circulating wanted poster, been aware of the government's unremitting determination to regain the face he had cost them by breaking into their fortress even though the President he'd been dispatched against was a year and a half out of office, but he hadn't realized it was this—personal. That the man would be determined to meet him in battle.

He'd thought about Wilson, in the intervening years. Once or twice. Especially after he finally realized his own parents hadn't sold him after all. Thought about him and his too-seeing eye, but not like this. When it came to the game of survival, Wilson was the driving force behind the government's uninspiring efforts, not a player in his own right.

Except, clearly, he was.

He'd been training, Grayson noted as they ducked and lunged through the trees, exchanging bladed blows just as they had five years ago, in the other Washington. There'd been a stiffness to the President's movements then, of skills fallen from their peak due to neglect. Not now.

But Grayson too had improved, become more flexible a fighter if not necessarily more skilled. And if he still didn't really want the old man dead…he wasn't fighting to escape before he could be cornered this time, either. He wasn't on enemy turf, and he wasn't under anyone's orders. Pressing him to his limits now was a very different thing indeed.

Wilson seemed determined to do it anyway. For all that the former President was more human than Grayson could ever recall being, he did not flinch when his own blood ran, and when he turned the edge of his sword wet, his eyes did not linger on that blood, either. Last time, he had been a bird defending its nest, all flurry and outrage. Now he had run Grayson to ground and laid a snare, and yet…

He slipped in and out of shadow without fear, because this was not his first midnight fight in woodland. Grayson could have reasoned as much, from the little he knew of the man's war-service, but he _knew _it. Just by watching. He was a stealth-killer in his own right, and Grayson was what he was hunting, and he was _angry_—five years later and the anger burned on, but that should not be surprising, because was his own anger with the Owls not still hot in his mouth? And yet there was something _missing._ Some hunger. Wilson was angry and yet he had held back, had waited for Grayson to draw his own blade, had not reached for his guns since Grayson put himself in reach.

He wanted something besides the assassin's death and Grayson _did not know what it was_, and so even though it bettered his chances, it was not welcome.

Grayson set his teeth and gave everything to the attack.

He bled for it, but his bearded opponent staggered back from a slash that should have opened his belly—yet instead merely sliced his dark uniform down to the armor beneath. Grayson felt his lips part slightly. Of course. Not pajamas, this time; mission gear. He had felt the solidity of it as they grappled, and of course sensible mortals took such precautions. _Gutting,_ somebody had laughed to him once, _can really mess up your whole day._

"You're smiling," said Wilson.

They were the first words either of them had spoken. The first moment of real surprise, maybe. Until now, each had known the other already knew anything they might have wanted to say.

Grayson hadn't been smiling. Not really. The tight line of his mouth that bared his teeth was a sign of tension that went back to his early days as Talon. The King of Owls had considered training it out of him, decided against it because of the unease it provoked. But he did smile, now that it had been said, because he _could_.

It had not been permitted that he reply, when Wilson spoke, at their last meeting. He could have, now. He had no master.

He chose not to.

He beckoned, instead, and regretted it instantly because the mighty two-handed blow Wilson brought down next broke straight through his guard, laying his chest open deep enough to notch the bone.

Without drawing back for power, which would have given Grayson time to recover and mount a new defense, the long blade whipped up again and drove, point-first, clear through the meat of his shoulder. (It had been aimed, before his hasty dodge, for his right lung.)

Grayson _dropped_, unhesitating, dragging the blade down with him as he did, because the upper edge was flat and could not begin to slice its way free at such an angle—even the sharp edge would have had some difficulty, cutting up through where arm and collarbone met, unless it happened on just the right point to sever the tendons cleanly. His move was agonizing, insane—no one with a halfway normal body would have done it, if not out of the natural unwillingness to invite worse pain into what was already agony, then because of how much more likely it made the injury to irreparably cripple the limb.

Therefore Wilson wasn't sufficiently braced to resist, and Grayson was able to reach the ground, brace himself against the dirt, one hand wrapped around the back of the swordblade to keep it trapped. Kick out, with enough force to snap both bones in Wilson's left lower leg.

A fierce, low growl of pain forced its way out between clenched teeth, and the older man's left knee hit the ground.

Grayson somersaulted back, out of range, letting Wilson's sword slide free, sheathed his own weapon, and ran.

Wilson would probably pursue him even on a broken leg, but it would cost him enough speed that Grayson could now leave him behind, without forsaking caution entirely.

He could not have missed numbers enough to encircle this wood completely. Even if they had closed in from somewhere, he could find a weak place in the line. He _would_ escape, again. They would not hold him.

His path out should closely parallel his path in. They might be expecting that, but they would be stupid to concentrate _all_ their force there, and the slightly elevated possibility of encountering more enemies was not enough to outweigh the benefits of already knowing the terrain.

He leapt over a stand of brambles without being snagged; rolled, vaulted upright over a large stone and raced onward with his boots trying to stick in the mud, barely rustling the ferns up a shallow slope until he reached another, far smaller break in the forest, this one merely the place where an ancient tree had fallen, and not yet been replaced, though the slim grey trunks of the rapid-sprouting aspens were beginning to fill their way in.

There, where the ground lay open to the sky, he stopped. _Someone was waiting._

A breath, and the someone stepped from behind the gnarled roots of the fallen cedar, into the moonlight.

Grayson had very little grasp of beauty. He did not know whether it was a natural insensibility or a result of his upbringing, but even after five years free, his aesthetic understanding was strictly pragmatic, especially when it came to human beings. But that abstract quality had significant interpersonal currency, and so he had always maintained some awareness of attractiveness, in its role as a source of social capital.

As his new opponent straightened into the light, Grayson recognized the body language of someone who was beautiful, and knew it. Something in the arch of the neck. The proud tilt of the chin. The way a curl fell against a cheek. You could use that against people—most famously Owlman had targeted that part of Harvey Dent, cutting apart his self-image at the root, though the practical results had been mixed at best—and Grayson noted that this opponent was especially likely to flinch from potential damage to his face.

Then he met overlarge green eyes, and recognized the face itself.

He knew those eyes. They had stared at him, shocked, shattered, terrified, furious, on the night Talon had ended.

The older Wilson boy, the one he'd killed—he was nothing. A corpse in a sea of corpses. But Joseph—if he had not been underestimated, if he had not dodged that first blow. If he had not cried out to those who heard him. The mission would not have failed. The Wilson parents would not have known to join the fight. His scream had changed Grayson's life.

He owed those eyes.

_They went black._

He tried to rear back, and found he could not move, as Joseph's form went blurred and uncertain—his vision was going; he'd been poisoned, _when, _with _what?_—but the forest behind remained sharp and clear even if he couldn't turn his head or eyes to look at it—the ghost of a boy he'd failed to kill stepped forward and kept stepping until he'd walked straight through Grayson's _face_—a feeling like cold water.

His limbs moved again. _He was not the one moving them._

Shoulders rolled. His weight shifted from foot to foot. Gloved fingertips brushed his throat.

Drew back, and spread themselves in front of his eyes, experimentally twitching.

A rustle in the brush; he turned to face it. Wilson emerged, his broken leg dragging slightly. He seemed to have applied a basic splint to himself.

"Dad," said Grayson's voice. His mouth bent in a smile.

The old man's eyebrows arched. "You got him." He was not unilaterally pleased.

Neither was Grayson.

Somewhere, even further back in his mind than his consciousness had been forced, he could hear himself screaming.

"Turns out his voice works fine," said his mouth. His right hand flicked scornfully through a sign he didn't know, and knew no better for his hand having made it, but Wilson seemed to understand. His eye was heavy with some sort of feeling.

Grayson was far from fearless. Personally, he considered himself a coward. Most of the things that frightened other people meant nothing to him, but when he _was_ afraid—when there was something he considered worth fearing, he fled.

It wasn't as though he had anything to fight for.

Only himself. But he _had_ a self, he'd achieved that. He'd die before he'd lose that. He'd run forever, he'd fight and kill the whole world before he'd lose that.

His hand rose again without his will, combed thoughtfully through his hair, and then pulled the most obvious of his knives from its sheath at his belt to run it along his opposite thumb, splitting the skin so that blood dripped out onto the forest floor—he felt his face split in turn into a wide, unaccustomed grin, as the cut vanished again.

The pain was nothing—a faint stinging, easily ignored—but what it _meant—_

He did not owe Joseph Wilson _this_ much. Even if he had, he would never willingly pay.

Which was why he had been given no choice.

"Joey…" said Wilson.

Grayson's eyes snapped up to him. "Oh, sorry. Am I making you _uncomfortable,_ Dad? With my creepy body-snatching powers?"

"It's not the powers that worry me, son."

"'It's how I use them,' I _know_. At this rate I could just burn a CD of your three favorite lectures and carry it around to be my father."

So ungrateful. The boy who had screamed for help with such deep belief that help would come to him had grown to take that faithfulness for granted. He did not appreciate having parents both willing and able to rescue him. Grayson would have slapped the boy across the face, had it not currently been his own, and had he had control of either of his hands.

Joseph snorted. "Oh, and he thinks I'm a spoiled brat because I'm not still thanking you every day for stopping him from finishing me off, or something."

Joseph Wilson could _read his mind,_ and the screaming grew louder until it threatened to drown out rational thought. It had been years since he was this afraid. Since the night terror had broken through terror and he had fled beyond his master's reach, reclaimed his body and his name.

He felt his teeth clench. "Don't start," said his tongue and throat and lips, and they were no longer addressing Slade. "You killed my brother," the surviving Wilson boy reminded him. "He bled out a few feet away from me, and I wasn't even looking at him when he passed, because you had your knife at my throat. Which you cut. Destroying my voice.

"Do you understand? Whatever I do to you, it will be less than you deserve."

As if deserving had ever had anything to do with what happened to anyone.

"I'll teach you to regret it," Joseph hissed through Grayson's teeth. Again he stroked flesh with the knifeblade, again blood ran—more rapidly, from his arm this time. Grayson writhed up within his own skull, and was pinned helpless. "I'm just getting started," his lips whispered. Another stroke. Grayson was indifferent to the damage, but still he screamed. Joseph smiled.

And suddenly, the terror ripened into fury.

Certainly he had wronged this boy. Grayson had some respect for the idea of revenge.

But that he thought to teach _him_ pain. This boy, this much-beloved little angel to whom the worst thing that had ever happened was a few minutes' exposure to _Talon,_ no matter how devastating the result, this _child_ whose parents had flown to his side and given him everything in their power, as the _nation_ stood by holding its breath in the hope that he would live…

Whatever devilry allowed the stealing of his body, it also had sunk hooks into his most inner self. That was violation beyond anything he had lived through, but it was also _opportunity._ He had known the value of a sacrificial blow when Joseph Wilson was still sucking at his mother's breasts.

Quickly, abruptly, so that Wilson would not have time to prepare some countermeasure, Grayson opened himself up to it. To his _childhood_, the months and years that had been the breaking and making of him. Let himself relive the things that in daily life he always shut away and did not touch, even as fact-memories, let alone experiences.

Wondered as he let the onslaught come whether this forced connection would convey _understanding_, somehow, of the incomprehensible. Could help this brat who played at torture grasp what it was to break another living thing apart with your own hands until it would give you anything, for the sake of a moment's mercy.

What it was to fight on with half a dozen swords rammed through you to the hilt. What it was to be a plaything for men who loved the sight of blood.

What it had been to die, chained to a table, six years old and understanding that _nobody would come to save you_.

_This is me,_ he thought, and used the thought as muscle behind the spear forged of a lifetime of remembered agony. **_This_**_ is what you thought yourself strong enough to steal._

A cry burst from his throat and he could not tell which of them was screaming. Wilson, probably. There was too much shock in the sound for it to be him. His own suffering could never be a surprise.

And with that thought he brought his right arm around, movement smooth and easy and natural in the possessor's distraction, and plunged the blade of his hand into his gut and up inside the ribs.

Another scream, unexpected real pain tearing through real stolen flesh more overwhelming than the worst remembered agony, and Wilson scrabbling to seize control of the traitor arm again, but the jerk of Grayson's hand inside his ribcage as they fought for dominance brought such searing new hurt that he lost it again—they had pitched backward onto the grass in the two and a half seconds since he launched his mental attack—and the father was there now, crouched on the good leg, hard hands on shoulder and elbow but bewildered, hesitant to use his full strength when the hand attached to the arm was buried in fragile organs, and his son was buried in the flesh.

The sight of Slade Wilson's drawn face blinked into greater resolution suddenly, not more clear in any technical sense but somehow more intense, and there was a shift in the single eye that suggested he could see whatever had caused the shift in perception. Then sight went distant again but he had still his right arm, and Grayson pressed on, up, hot blood gushing, fingernails scrabbling toward his heart—

With a sticky, tearing feeling like Velcro unpeeling from his soul, Joseph Wilson surrendered. Toppled out of Grayson's back into a heap on the grass, and all his limbs were his own again.

"Joey!" the President exclaimed, all his attention momentarily on his son. And in that window Grayson used his reclaimed freedom to strike_._ His right arm was still unavailable, deep in his own torso, but he had three other limbs and they moved unerringly. Left fist, to crack across the face. He felt bone break, but at this angle it could only kill if Slade fell poorly, passed out, and drowned in his own blood. One foot drove up, to catch the edge of the ribcage, and one down into the soft flesh of the lower abdomen.

Slade was down, at least for this second. And Grayson was upright again, extricating his dominant arm from his own viscera and whirling. The younger Wilson was collapsed in the grass, beaded with sweat, gaze distant, limbs trembling. His breath was uneven, and Grayson drove a swift foot into his diaphragm to keep it that way, then spun to bring his heel over an attack, against the side of the old soldier's head.

President Wilson fell senseless, and for a long second there were only Joseph's tiny wheezing attempts at breath to fill the silence of the glade.

He stood over their helpless forms, as the blood dripped from his fingers and the damage inside his chest crawled back together. He always felt that internal injuries healing felt oddly like churning maggots. Not that he'd ever had maggots grow in his own flesh; his wounds never lasted long enough for that. But he'd seen them.

Joseph was nearly the color of a maggot right now. Grayson despised him.

He had won. They were helpless, and miles from support. He could kill them both now. Or kill the father quickly, to eliminate him as a threat, and take a little time with the son.

Or perhaps he should merely put those dangerous eyes out. Perhaps the little fool would learn better than to hunt him, if he lost some major functionality at every encounter.

A breath of wind roused itself from somnolence and whispered through the leaves. _Fear,_ muttered the aspens, but it was not fear that filled him now. It was that black anger, the one that had fueled his victory over the body-stealer, the one he had never managed to feel unalloyed against Owlman even now, because he had been trained too well. One that made him feel jagged and reckless and consider simply slitting Joseph's throat properly this time, and letting his father wake to find his little golden monster already bled out. Kill, torture, maim…so many choices.

In the end, he did none of it. Keeping an eye on the blond for signs of recovery, while carefully _not _meeting his staring eyes, he turned the elder Wilson onto his side with another rough kick, swiftly stole his most visible weapons, and was gone.

* * *

Having discovered the absolute lack of backup the Wilsons had in fact left in wait for him, Grayson sat back in the bole of a large hollow tree miles from the battle site, examining the weapons he had carried away in lieu of his promised payment. The sword was of good quality, longer than he liked himself, and cumbersome without its sheath, which had been too securely bound to the soldier's back to bother freeing. That, he would sell.

One of the pistols was light and smooth enough he might keep it; he was developing a fondness for guns even though he would never resort to them automatically. The other was a heavier piece, more like what the more arrogant functionaries in Owlman's organized-crime subsidiaries had preferred. Good quality, as far as he could determine these things, and engraved along the barrel with a scrollworked _Deathstroke Squad_ on one side and _One shot, one kill,_ up the other. Some sort of memento, he gathered. Possibly valuable, but entirely too distinctive. He should not sell it; that would leave a trail, evidence that he had been where the sale took place.

He was distracted from evaluating his prizes—he had taken them mostly to demonstrate that he had not fled in disorganized terror, but quite intentionally walked away—by a sudden deep breath resounding, slightly crackling, through the small speaker tucked into his ear.

The audio bug that had been all he had on him was entirely inadequate, of course, since the boy could speak only with a stolen throat and had none to steal, but as this was an inconvenience entirely of his own making, Grayson spent no frustration on it.

Fixed to the back of Wilson's collar, the tiny microphone picked up his voice well. "Joey, look at me." There was a silence in which Grayson wondered whether or not the boy obeyed, and whether his father honestly trusted him enough to return the look, if he did. "You'll be alright." Not quite command, nor reassurance. Diagnosis, almost, Grayson decided. His affection for his remaining child had proven a weakness tonight, but he obviously had some control of it. "What did he do?"

There followed a few seconds of silence, which must be the younger Wilson signing an answer. "Ah," said the father at last. "Well, then. You'll have to be more careful from now on. You'll be alright," he repeated. "That's what's important."

There was another period of quiet, which might or might not contain silent communication. Grayson began stowing the guns and knives alongside his own.

"His eyes flashed blue, for a second, before you came out," Wilson told his son. "He looked…triumphant." Another silence, and then quietly, "I see. Did you at least learn who sent him, that night?" Then, "Yes, it matters! Oh, son. Come here."

There was the noisy rustle of fabric, collar rasping against the microphone. Silence, broken only by the faint disruption that would have been breathing through a better pickup.

Then a tap. More rustling, and the soft rip of adhesive giving way. A pause. "I don't know what you hoped to learn," Wilson's level voice said, almost directly into the microphone so that the speaker in Grayson's ear thundered with it. "But you won't. Joe says," he added, "that you won't catch him like that twice."

_That's my line,_ Grayson thought, as his hands wrapped the stolen sword in his cut and bloodied outer shirt, for travel. He smiled, a little, at how easily he had summoned the retort. If they had been face to face, he could have spoken it, at the normal interval, without a pause.

At the thought of being face to face with Joseph Wilson again, though, a shiver ran up his back. "We will find you," Wilson pronounced on the other end of the surveillance device, as if he knew the 'we' made it a far more terrible threat. "This isn't over." The speaker let out a tortured burst of sound as the bug was crushed, and then fell dead.

…Grayson was entirely recovered from the fight. He could be out of the country again by tomorrow.

* * *

_**A/N: **Some liberties taken with Joey's powers, partly because they were inconsistent in canon anyway and partly on the assumption that some of the differences when he was an evil ghost came from 'evil' instead of 'ghost.' Good Slade and Evil Joey is so weird.  
_


	58. Outlaws V: Proscriptiones

'Proscriptiones'

**_A/N:_**_ Well, this took forever to actually finish. As in, it was over half done when I posted the last Outlaws chapter, but I could not get it to gel, so I did Grayson's entire backstory in the interim. But it's my birthday weekend and I am posting fic! :] _

* * *

**1.** _Orion (Iason)_

They have the three days until Kori's space taxi arrives to wrap up the job Roy'd picked up from Ted Kord. That _should_ be plenty of time; it's just a standard extortion kidnapping. But if his partners are thinking like people bound for outer space instead of serious mercenaries, who knows what could happen.

Not that he doesn't trust his team to keep their heads in the game. Mostly. But he never knows what Grayson's thinking and Kori has her own priorities, and Earth money isn't one of them anymore.

Roy doesn't know the details of the ransom demands, though he can guess. It's not money—Ms. Rushkin is pretty well off, especially for a single black woman, but not likely to make a tempting target to anyone with Kord's resources, even if he'd been primarily a criminal and not just a really slimy businessman. Their fee alone is probably at least half of the largest ransom Rushkin could raise.

No, this little girl's mother works in R&amp;D for a company that's been moving in on Kord's turf, now that the economy's starting to bounce back from the war, and ten to one he wants to hijack their next batch of patents by getting her to smuggle him all their secret data. Roy and his team are just muscle, hired for their stealth/stopping-power combo rather than any particular expertise in the ransom business; they don't need to know that kind of thing.

(The fact that he wants stopping power for this kind of work suggests Rushkin might have a line on someone or something tough that might try to fight them for possession of the girl, but if so he conspicuously failed to warn them. They're planning on maintaining a rotating watch until the handoff is over.)

_Whatever_ Kord wants out of Rushkin, he needs leverage to get it. This is what they call in the business a 'tiger' kidnapping, for the long surveillance and stalking period that leads up to grabbing the pawn and then twisting the knife in your true target _just so_, to get what you want. The three of them have only been watching the household for the last five days, but their employer provided them with six months' worth of data when they took the contract. Most of that information they've already duplicated on their own, the daily routine, but the facts they're relying on here were all completely courtesy of the report, so it had better be right.

Supposedly, Philippa Rushkin regularly passes her daughter to hired sitters from a service, and on at least six occasions has abruptly been summoned away on some emergency business trip and handed off custody of the girl in the middle of the night, without warning her.

Kord manufactured such an emergency. Rushkin shelled out for two sitters, who arrived within half an hour of her call despite it being one in the morning. Excellent service. Arsenal and Greywing wait twenty minutes before they slip inside, and then they split up—Dick heading for the bedroom, Roy creeping downstairs to deal with the babysitters. They're on the sofa, the man watching TV with the volume low and the woman napping against his shoulder, which makes sense at two AM. Roy gets low to avoid being reflected in the screen, though it's a flatscreen so the scene would have to be fairly dark for that to be at all possible, and crawls over carpet to just behind the sofa. This is too easy.

Roy counts to thirty, then lunges up to smack chloroform-soaked pads over both sitters' faces. He waits until they stop moving, then pockets the pads and meets up with Dick, a limp little form in pink PJs slung over one shoulder. They slip away into the dark.

Roy always feels vaguely shitty about killing people who just happen to be in the way, but that's not why they left the sitters alive. If Kord had wanted them dead, well then, it'd be done. But he specifically said not to…and it _wasn't _because he's a nice guy.

When you see him in those boxy blue suits with the douchey orange glasses, a slightly overweight, round-shouldered scientist with a slight smile, Kord doesn't look dangerous. And he's not, not like the people Roy's used to who can twist off your head or get a knife in your back before you know they're there. (The, you know, type of dangerous people he _lives with._)

Talking a straight fight, even Luthor (who hates hurting people, Ultraman possibly excepted) might be a bigger threat, just because he can _hit_.

But Kord is _sane._ Totally, coldly sane, the way Wayne never was, the way Superwoman sure as _hell _wasn't, still less Ultraman, the way even Oliver wasn't or he wouldn't've put himself out in harm's way over and over again, shooting at enemies his own self when he had people for that.

Kord does exactly what he decides is optimal to achieve his goals, and in this case, the goal is to make sure the police and the target corporation never know Philippa Rushkin's daughter was kidnapped in the first place. And two sitters being threatened and bribed into reporting nothing about their failure is subtler than two mysterious disappearances, and _infinitely_ subtler than two dead bodies in Rushkin's living room, which she is not equipped to dispose of subtly and which would give the game away.

So. Nonlethal force. Some other contractor will handle the shutting-them-up end of things. Probably whoever's negotiating the ransom. Kord thinks the Outlaws don't know who hired them; Roy is used to being underestimated. After all, he was quietly sorting out Oliver Queen's shit for him on the regular by the time he turned sixteen.

They start pretty young on his side of the line, but there aren't many right-hand men out there who haven't started shaving.

Six hours after her kidnapping, Dorea Rushkin wakes up in a child-sized bed in a room done up in a dull, old-lady sort of pink, with a collection of toys lined up on the carpet against one wall. She lies still for three careful little-girl breaths, sits up, and stares around with oddly unsurprised eyes, considering this definitely isn't where she fell asleep last night. Roy, watching her through the buttonhole camera over the door lintel, raises his eyebrows at his laptop screen.

Only twice that the dossier knew of had Rushkin dropped her daughter off somewhere in the middle of the night, rather than calling in someone to take care of her, but apparently that's enough precedent for the brat to take an unfamiliar bedroom with nothing but a sort of pinched resignation. She swings her feet over the side of the bed and drops the two inches to the floor, and pads in her purple footie pajamas over to the boxy little chest of drawers, and the glass of water placed considerately on top.

She drinks the whole thing, then wipes her mouth on her pink pajama sleeve.

The holding site is a much nicer apartment than the one they evacuated yesterday evening, though slightly smaller. It has thick, earth-tone carpets and walls recently repainted in neutral pastels, a slickly appointed kitchen with no actual cooking utensils, three bedrooms including the one set up for the kid, which works out since they're standing a rotating watch and only two of them will ever be asleep at any given time, a ridiculously clean bathroom, and a locked closet that's intended for linens and maybe the vacuum cleaner, but actually contains most of Roy's heavy armaments.

Kord had it rented through cut-outs, same way he hired the Outlaws, and it's been thoroughly enough cleaned and is generic enough that it should be pretty much untraceable even after the fact. It's comfortable and private, which is more than Roy could say for a lot of places he's gone to ground. Downside of the untraceability is, it's got no special features, like soundproofing. Hopefully the neighbors will keep it down to a dull roar.

Roy is ready when the bedroom door swings open, laptop screen angled away from it, can of soda in one hand. "Hey, squirt," he says, with honest disinterest. "You finally woke up."

"When do I go home?"

"When your mom's ready," Roy shrugs. It's even a mostly honest answer; the timing of this job is going to be mostly controlled by how long it takes Rushkin to first agree to the ransom, and then extract the information Kord wants. The Outlaws have her until tomorrow, probably.

"Oh."

She just stands there, looking pink and brown and _blank_, and Roy stares expectantly back at her. She doesn't say anything. He could go back to his computer, but what he was doing on it was watching her, and since it's his job to watch her he might as well do it directly.

He's a sniper. He can wait hours for his shot almost without motion. This random kid is not going to outwait him.

She does not appear to realize this.

Luckily, after about a minute and a half of mutual staring Kori comes in. She's wearing jeans and a green turtleneck along with sunglasses, the mirrored kind from the nineties that fit against the face tight enough that even a nosy kid won't be able to just peer under them. She's also holding a paper plate in each hand. "Waffles," she announces. "Real honey."

"I want those!" their target asserts. "Um, please?"

Kori sets the plates on the table, sliding one toward the kid and pulling out a chair to sit down in front of the other. Frozen waffles are not _quite_ the limit of her human-digestible cooking abilities, but they're close. Dorea Rushkin clambers up onto the chair, grinning, and then pauses uncertainly. "Do I getta fork?" she hazards, looking down at the honey-coated crunchy breakfast pastry thing. Roy raises his eyebrows. Aren't kids supposed to be sticky little monsters?

"Greywing is bringing them," Kori informs her. To listen to her, you'd think this kid was their newest teammate, getting the lowdown on their gear complement. Sheesh.

Dick comes in from the kitchen with a stack of paper cups and bundle of plastic forks in one hand, and half a gallon of milk in the other. He ceremoniously hands their target one of the forks, which makes her giggle before she digs in, and then turns and gives one to Kori, too.

Their eyes meet, in spite of the sunglasses, and they share a funny little smile.

Roy doesn't know whether to groan or cheer. (Seriously though, the most overtly romantic moment he's seen them have and it's over a _fork? _These two deserve each other.)

"Hey," he says instead, as soon as they're done having their private moment right there in public and Grayson tosses the last fork at him and starts unstacking the cups, presumably to fill them with the milk he made Roy haul over from the old hideout. "Don't I get a waffle?"

"In the toaster, Arsenal," says Grayson tonelessly. "You're a grownup, you can wait."

"Ladies first," Starfire concurs, and cuts into her Eggos.

The kidnap victim giggles.

The kid gets sticky anyway, which Roy should have predicted. She washes herself up, though, in the bathroom, which is good because none of them would be his first, second, or eightieth choice for sponging honey off a child's hands and face. They are dangerous mercenaries. None of them cross-trained as _babysitters._

It wasn't his idea to leave her unrestrained.

As far as he can tell, his teammates' logic runs something like this: If the operation goes well, she'll never tell the police about this anyway, because her mom will have to keep it secret, because she'll have participated in industrial espionage.

And if the thing gets screwed up and the cops find out about the kidnapping, Kord's going to be the obvious suspect because his company is the one that stands to gain from whatever he's making Rushkin do. If Kord gets squeezed, he'll sell the Outlaws down the river in a hot second. And if the authorities _do _wind up talking to the brat and identify them that way, and add the kidnapping to their tab, it's not like it'll really change their wanted status, what with the war crimes on Kori's record and the government perfectly happy to crucify Roy in Oliver's place, since the actual leader of the Black Bow ended the war way too beheaded to stand trial.

And what with Greywing being _The June '01 Assassin_, he guesses, although no one official actually _knows_ that, and it's kind of old news at this point. Though given the noise people still make about who really whacked Kennedy, he guesses it's not surprising they haven't really let that one go yet, considering nobody was ever caught for the Wilson killing at all.

Anyway, they're leaving the planet in two days.

He's pretty sure, though, that all of that reasoning is just justifications for his partners not _wanting_ to keep her tied up and blindfolded for however long this is going to take. He wouldn't normally accuse Kori of being soft (Dick…maybe, except in other areas he's still a straight-up legit psychopath so whatever), but they both have kidnapping _issues._ So. Fine. If she never knows she was kidnapped, all the better. If this whole thing goes smoothly, maybe she'll never even know anything happened except weird babysitters.

Only if her mom is a really cool customer, though.

He still made Kori wear the sunglasses. They make her look more than a little bit like an utter retro dipshit with a godawful spray tan, especially since they're inside with the blinds closed, and she complains about the reduction of her vision, but it's better than being instantly recognizable via the most casual of descriptions. There's probably _somebody_ besides Kori on this planet with glowing green eyes, but the odds of that person being a redheaded woman are low, and the odds of her _also_ being orange are scraping negative infinity. 'Nuclear Fusion' has been flying below the radar pretty well since just after Superwoman was brought down. No need to break the streak on the home stretch.

(It also hides some of the damage from her fight with her sister. A black eye on a Tamaranean is seriously freaky stuff. Being lit from the middle and all.)

And then _of course_ his partners blow his efforts by using all their codenames in the first five minutes. Code names which of course are not odd or memorable _at all._ He _knows_ Grayson is subtler than this. Does he just not care? Is there some weird ex-Talon logic going on here where they're on a job so codenames _must_ be dropped?

He goes to dump the disposable dishes into the kitchen trash after breakfast, and stares at them for a few seconds after he does it. They are three very dangerous people. He knows this. How did they turn into _actual babysitters_?

Roy shakes his head. Well, he was the one who insisted they go through with this. No way out but through.

"I could try," Grayson is saying in that reserved, almost-but-never-quite-skittish way of his when Roy comes back into the room.

"What are we trying?" he asks, not without trepidation.

Dorea bounces. "Wing's gonna tell a story!"

Roy narrows his eyes at their ninja, who has ensconced himself in the one comfortable chair in the small living room. "_You're_ going to tell a story."

"Nothing wrong with my voice," says Greywing, which is true and not the point.

Roy eyeballs him a second, then shrugs, drops down, and sits crosslegged on the rug. "Okay, then. This should be fun."

"You like stories, 'rs'nal?" Dorea chirps. A glint of calculation in her eyes.

Roy will never get kids. She's trusting enough to totally buy that they're legitimate babysitters, but sneaky enough to be dropping test questions to see if she actually _approves_ of each of them. This would be like if, when Queen first picked him up off the street, Roy'd skipped straight over being wary about all the fucked-up reasons a powerful guy might offer a homeless kid a job, and judged Oliver entirely by his coffee preferences. (Expensive, with way more cream and sugar than the manly rep of anyone less badass could have survived—Roy spent a lot of time being coffee boy and running messages, when there wasn't call for a sniper, before he got old enough for actual business more involved than 'shoot that guy in the neck.')

"I'm looking forward to seeing what kind of story 'Wing tells," he says, making his eyebrows tell the squirt not to give him any shit.

"That's not an answer," she pouts. Defying the eyebrows.

"That's 'cause it was a dumb question," he drawls back.

He hasn't failed to notice the awkwardness his teammates have with her—they hide it pretty well, but like most normal human stuff, he's the one with the most practice with kids. Not so much with _childcare_, but there were younger kids on the rez and he went to school till he was thirteen, and there were a lot of guys with families in the Black Bow. There's nothing special about kids, they're just tiny ignorant people. He doesn't get the hype.

This brat's pretty funny, though.

* * *

**2.** _Adonis (Ganymede)_

"Nothing wrong with my voice," he tells Roy levelly, and it's a lie but it's true enough for now.

He ignores the ensuing burst of verbal sparring between Arsenal and their mission objective—Roy's need to intricately negotiate boundaries and dominance patterns with every individual he has contact with is something Grayson has grown used to—while he settles the story in his mind. Roy drops onto the floor near Grayson's chair with his back against the wall and tries to draw Grayson into his and Dorea's verbal game, but all he gets is a tiny smile.

He's glad not to be left alone with the child, whatever Roy's reasons are. (He harbors an irrational fear he will forget she is a _kidnap_ target and slit her throat, if she startles him.)

"Dorea," he says, and she looks up attentively.

"Storytime?" she prompts.

He smiles his best smile for her. "If you're done talking to Arsenal."

A sniff dismisses Arsenal's existence, before she flops down beside him on the rug. Grayson is relieved. Her heartbeat against his arm if she had sat _on_ him would have been distracting. Three pairs of eyes are disconcerting enough.

Roy has a point, after all. This is going to be the longest he has talked since he was six. Or possibly ever. He doesn't actually remember the time before he was Talon very well.

It's fine. Just break it into pieces. A story is made of sentences, and sentences are easy now.

"Once upon a time, there was a princess."

In the far corner, where she has taken up the less-comfortable chair beside the one chink in the blinds, Kori's expression twitches a little, and she becomes a little less subtle about watching him rather than the street outside. Maybe she thinks the story is going to be about her, but that is hers to tell, and Dorea isn't old enough to understand it yet.

This story doesn't belong to anyone real.

"What was her name?" Dorea demands.

She didn't have one. But Grayson refuses to say that. Everyone has a name, even if nobody remembers it. "Martha. And she was promised in marriage to a prince who lived very, very far away. And when the time came for her beautiful daughter to depart, the old queen packed her golden cups and diamond rings and all the things that make a rich dowry, because she loved her with all her heart. She gave her child a horse to ride, and the horse was a magic talking horse called Falada, and she gave her a maid to ride beside her and keep her company on the journey."

Their local princess snorts. "A maid? With all that treasure, there should be a company of guards."

"Large troop movements draw attention," Grayson retorts. "Stop interrupting."

"Yeah, stop in'ruptin'," Dorea agrees, smirking.

Children are very strange.

"The queen knew that the road could be treacherous, so before they departed she went alone to her tower and pricked her finger with a silver dagger, and let three drops of blood fall onto a silk handkerchief. This she took to her daughter, saying, keep this charm and no harm will come to you."

Dorea is chewing thoughtfully on her own wrist as she listens. It is mildly disconcerting. "It was magic?"

"Yes."

"So the queen was a witch?"

"A good witch. Yes."

"Hmph," says Kori.

"Sh!" says Dorea. She leans forward a little, absorbed in the narrative. "An' then what?"

"The maidservant was standing nearby, and she heard the queen's words to Princess Martha." He uses the name at the last second. "Which was misfortune, for though her face was fair her heart was full of hate. So after goodbyes had been said and the journey begun, after some time the travelers came to a stream.

"'I am so thirsty,' said the princess. 'Pray take my golden cup and fetch me some water.'"

Kori snorts, either at the affected language—he knows she can understand it because _he_ understands it, and she learned her English from him—or at the stupidity of not having brought a store of something as important as water. Grayson agrees that it was a very strangely planned journey, but it's a _story._ Everyone ignores her. (Not that Richard can, really. She's watching him.) "'I am tired,' replied the maid. 'Fetch it yourself.'

"So the princess got down from Falada's white back and took her golden cup and knelt by the stream to drink. Martha was very young, to be getting married. Nothing bad had ever happened to her, and she thought that meant nothing ever would. 'Ah,' sighed the three drops of blood, 'if your mother only knew, I'm sure her heart would break in two.'

"But having had her drink Martha mounted up again, and she and the maidservant—"

"What was _her_ name?" demands Dorea suddenly.

"Angeline."

(This is the name of a woman he killed when he was a few years older than Dorea is now; a practice mission for times when he might have to engage his targets verbally in order to get them into position. _I'm Angeline, _she smiled down. _What's your name? _He convinced her he'd found a hurt kitten in an alleyway, then stabbed her in the eye when she bent down to look into the box. That was not a tactic Owlman ever favored for Talon afterward, but it had been valuable to know he _could_ be used that way.

Such a _waste_.)

"Martha and _Angeline,_" he continues, finding the thread of the story again, "rode on. Until Martha was thirsty again, and said, 'Pray take my golden cup and fill it from the river.'"

"And 'ngeline said, 'I'm tired, get it yourself!'" Dorea guesses, so proud of herself Richard would probably agree even if she were wrong.

"That's right. So Martha knelt down by the river again, scooping at the water, and as she bent the handkerchief with the three drops of blood slipped from her pocket. 'Oh!' said the blood as it was washed away downstream, 'if your mother only knew, her heart would surely break in two!' And Angeline was pleased, because she knew that without that charm Princess Martha was defenseless. So she said, 'Take off your fine clothes and exchange them for mine. If you argue I will kill you.'"

"Yet _another_ reason there should have been an armed guard," grouses Starfire.

"Oh shush up," Roy tells her, as if he has forgotten his usual subtle deference to her—or maybe he is just vitally interested in the fairy tale, for whatever reason. He looks up at Grayson again, expectant, says, "Seriously, though, has this witch-queen never heard of running background checks."

Richard shrugs. "There is always an infiltrator to defeat any countermeasure."

"She took her _clothes?_" demands Dorea, bored with not understanding what they're talking about.

"Yes, and forced Martha to put on her maidservants' things. And then she said, I belong on Falada, and you belong on my nag, and the princess had to accept it." He sees Koriand'r stiffen, just slightly, so subtly, at the corner of his vision. Her aura does not quite flare. This story perhaps treads too closely on hers, after all.

"What's a nag?" asks Dorea, before he can consider stopping.

"A bad horse." Kori would not thank him for coddling her. The story will continue. "And then Angeline required her to swear under the open heaven to speak of this to no one and keep her true name secret, or lose her life. So she swore, weeping.

"They rode on until they reached the palace of Martha's betrothed, where there was much rejoicing, and the prince rushed down to lift the pretty maidservant in the fine dress off the white horse, thinking she was his bride. And the true princess was left behind in the courtyard until the old king saw her through the window, beautiful even in her poor clothes, and asked who she was.

"'Oh,' said Angeline, now called Martha, 'I brought her as a companion, but she is no good to me at all. Give her some work so she will not be idle.'

"There were no places for delicate girls open in the royal household, besides in the service of the new princess, so the king said that she could assist the young boy who herded his geese, and that was that."

"Is that the end?" Dorea asks doubtfully, and he feels himself smile a little.

"No. The boy's name was Conrad," he says, pleased that someone in the story besides the horse comes with a name. Amazed that he remembers it, but the further he gets into the story the more it returns to him, until he thinks he can almost hear his mother's voice. He cannot, though. He has long forgotten what it sounded like. "And as soon as Martha had gone away with him and the treasures had all been unloaded, the false princess commanded that the white horse Falada be put to death—she said that it had been a disobedient and troublesome beast, but really she knew that it could sometimes speak, and did not want her secret revealed.

"She had Falada's head nailed up over the gate where Martha and Conrad drove the geese out every day, and when the goose-girl passed under it she would say,

"'Alas, Falada, hanging there!'"

"Weak," says Kori, and Richard looks up at her. Strong feeling, he determines, but not deep—the fire and color in her is bright, but not threatening to burst forth. She is annoyed with his story, but no longer taking it personally. Richard finds the smile resting more easily on his lips. He knew she would relax, if he kept going—he _knows_ her. Not merely as like reflects like, now, but through familiarity. Through time.

"Smart," he disagrees. And lets it be only for the story, only for Martha. "Remember that," he bends his head again to tell Dorea. "The princess didn't have the power to fight the witch right then, so she waited, and she stayed alive."

"But her horsie!" Stains of blood have risen faintly in the child's dark cheeks; she has no interest in advice on survival. Doesn't even suspect that _they_ are the monsters in her own fairytale. "She should have saved her!"

"It's okay," Richard soothes, and he can feel the little girl's elevated heartbeat through the arteries in the palm of her hand. There was a time when he could not even look a child in the face without seeing it covered in blood, whether the child was bleeding or not. "Falada was a magic horse. She'll be fine. And the head said to the goose-girl, 'Alas, young queen, passing by, if your mother only knew, her heart would surely break in two.'"

Roy is giving him _such_ a look, clear as words: 'you think a talking disembodied horse head is going to make the kid feel better?' But Grayson distinctly remembers this being part of the story, and anyway, it _does._ She straightens up, attentive again, and Grayson moves on.

"Each day, when they had brought the geese to pasture, the goose-girl would sit and brush out her hair, which was of pure gold. Every day, Conrad tried to steal a few strands, and Martha would say," Grayson pauses, here, trying to remember the rhyme his mother used, and failing. "'Wind that comes throughout the day, blow Conrad's hat clean away.'"

Roy gives a little snort, but Grayson feels that for the first poetry he has ever composed, it was not bad.

"So then the wind would come up and blow Conrad's hat all around the field, and he would be busy chasing it until Martha had finished brushing and braiding her hair."

"So she was a witch, too?"

He supposes so. "Not as powerful as her mother, or Angeline." Dorea nodded, as if this was obvious. "After many days of this, the goose boy went to the old king and said, I will not work with that girl anymore. Asked why, he told the king all about the talking horse head and the magic wind.

The next day, the king hid nearby and heard Martha the goose-girl say to the princess' beheaded horse, 'Alas, Falada, hanging there!'

"And the horse-head reply, 'Alas, young queen, passing by. If your mother only knew, her heart would surely break in two.'"

Dorea finished Falada's chant with him, which he thinks he might have used to do with his mother.

"And once he had seen everything, the king called the goose-girl to him and asked for an explanation. She answered, 'I am forbidden to speak of it to another living soul, for I swore an oath under the open sky.'

"So the king said, 'Tell your troubles to this iron stove, then,' and went away."

"To the _stove,_" Arsenal repeats, before the little girl can say anything. "I no longer have any idea where this is going." Grayson raises an eyebrow at him, and he spreads his hands, resettles himself on the floor. "But I trust you, keep going. Might as well converse with kitchen appliances, that's actually less weird than severed horse heads."

Grayson does not obey the direction to continue straight away.

Dorea Rushkin is ignorant, and innocent. Her trust means nothing.

But Arsenal knows what he is. Knows him better probably than anyone alive, because Starfire only met Talon the once, for that commanded kiss. Increasingly, Arsenal _sees _him. Just yesterday Richard held Roy at knife point in the attempt to make him stop talking about what he saw. Just yesterday, Roy was enraged by the realization that Richard had become attached and wanted to keep their team together for reasons that had nothing to do with their usefulness to each other.

This is Roy Harper, who remembers every slight against him and broods over grudges with the implacability of rigor mortis. And who is careless with his words, sometimes, but not of such things as this.

"So the real princess," he says, after a single frozen second waiting for Roy to realize what he has said and take it back, "climbed inside the stove, which was empty even of ashes, and because she was alone and had frustrated her own best hope in the name of honor, she wept and told the cold iron everything that had happened between her and Angeline.

"But the old king had gone up onto the roof and was listening down the stove-pipe, and heard it all. And he was pleased, for though his new daughter-in-law was beautiful and clever he had not been able to like her, and he went to Martha as she crawled out of the stove and embraced her, and had her bathed by servants and clad in a gown of silk and pearls."

"He showed the false Princess Martha the nameless goose-girl, and asked her what the punishment should be, for one who attempted to lie and claim a rank that was not hers. And thinking Martha had broken her oath and told the truth, but not been believed, Angeline said that she should be nailed up in a barrel full of broken glass, and rolled down the cobbled streets of the city until she had been sliced to death.

"And the king said, You have pronounced your own sentence. And so it was that the witch was punished and the princess restored to her place."

"And did she see her mom again?" Dorea queries.

Grayson blinks. He was not prepared for all these _questions_. He feels as if he has told a lie in a mission report, and is being forced to furiously invent new lies to fill gaps the first one created, or be found out. He shakes off the feeling; he has not planned a deception that poorly in any of the few times he has had need to mislead an employer, and it will do him no good to let the trapped sensation of having tried to circumvent Owlman's will close around him. He knows from experience it will strangle the words from his throat, and Dorea will not understand. She will be afraid.

He is willing to frighten her, of course, given reason. Would kill her, for the right incentive. He knows himself. But he has also accepted that it is not weakness that he does not _want_ to.

Does not want to be the reason that this child never sees her mother again.

Or at least, if it is weakness, it is one he is willing to allow himself. Everyone he has ever observed to possess contentment had at least one point of immense vulnerability. As long as he knows what his weaknesses are, he can defend them.

"She did," he says, surprising himself with the gentleness of his voice. "It was a long journey, but after Martha's brother became king, the old queen could spare the time to come and visit. And she used her magic to heal the horse Falada," he adds, remembering belatedly that he had promised something of the sort.

"That's good," their temporary charge concludes. Seems a little melancholy. Missing her own mother, Richard thinks.

"Yes."

"Can we play dolls now?" Dorea asks, and then seeming to take Roy's agreement for granted, seizes him by the wrist and tugs him after her toward the dull pink bedroom designated as hers.

This tactic turns out to work just as well for her as it usually does for Kori, despite the fact that the tiny human girl lacks the power either to physically drag Arsenal anywhere, or to visit grievous bodily harm if defied. He shoots a glare at Greywing, daring him to comment, and Richard merely smiles. A tactic which reliably infuriates the already irate.

Grayson watches through the open door as Roy manages to escape the prospect of dolls and cajole Dorea into something that turns quickly into a game of catch, with a stuffed pig as the ball. It probably helps that these are unfamiliar toys. He's heard that children get attached to particular dolls.

Kori rises, in his left peripheral vision, a fact he notes but does not consider personally relevant until she comes toward him. (He has not been avoiding her. That would be ridiculous. Roy is obviously imagining things, anyway.)

She settles down in the other chair on this side of the room, the one with very stiff cushions, and he watches her from the corner of his eye but keeps the bulk of his attention on the game progressing in the bedroom. Roy is goading Dorea into taking ever more wild shots with the pig, all of which he is managing to catch without standing up. If she were capable of putting a little more power into her throws, it might count as training.

"You invented that story?" Starfire asks him in an undertone.

* * *

**3.** _Artemesia (Callisto)_

"You invented that story?" Koriand'r asks, watching her comrade Richard, the grey-winged. Each of her humans continually reveals new depths to his character, and every time she contrives to be startled.

"Uh?" Greywing answers. She has very rarely taken him by surprise. She assumes _this_ surprise is real because he is not wearing a surprised expression. "No. It's old. My mother used to tell it to me."

His mother. Dead, of course—humans are fragile and their society is worse, and most of them seem to be clanless orphans. She knows his parents taught him to come as close to flying as she has ever seen anything come without the power of flight, enough that he took it into his name, and that his accursed master taught him everything else, but that is all.

And his mother taught him the story of the gooseherd princess, with its satisfyingly bloody ending.

"Your parents," she says. "What became of them?"

Greywing blinks. Looks at his hands. They are strange, his hands—seeing them working alongside Roy's these past months, she has noticed it. Strange because _perfect_, unmarred by scars like Roy's, unmarked by anything at all. Even Kori has her scars, some of them deep and dreadful. Even Superwoman had weapon-calluses. But Richard's are as a child's hands, soft and smooth for all their strength. As though he has never worked or fought in his life.

His hands are a lie, and yet they are the most honest part of him, more likely to say what he is feeling than his back or his eyes.

"When the Court took me," he says, tongue slower than usual, almost stumbling, "my parents…took exception. Wouldn't stop digging." He shrugs. "There was an _accident_." He is quiet, but Koriand'r can feel more words resting on his tongue, and waits. "I didn't know then," he adds, not looking at her. "They told me I'd been sold."

After he escaped, he must have looked. To hunt them down and punish them for their betrayal, perhaps—she knows _she_ would have vengeance on the mind, if she had been betrayed for mere _wealth, _but Greywing is hard to predict. Must have found his mother and father long dead, whatever he intended. Found traces of their search. Realized they had wanted him after all.

Jealousy flares. They failed, they died, he never knew they had made the attempt—but Greywing had someone trying for him. Her parents were prepared to sacrifice her, and her people could not spare the effort for her rescue. Only one worthless, traitorous sister, and her far too late.

She saw that same jealousy in both men's eyes when she spoke of her mother and father, still living. Grits her teeth. "I am sorry," she tells him.

He blinks. Grins, all teeth. "About to leave the planet, you finally bother with Earth manners?"

"This isn't manners!" she snaps, letting her aura flare, but keeping her voice down. Distressing the child is to be avoided. She will wail. Human infants sound very like their warning sirens. (Or, come to think of it, probably the other way around.) It will be unpleasant and could draw attention. "This is _sorry._ Sentiment." Dares, and sets the tips of her fingers on his wrist. "It _should not_ have been so, Richard."

He doesn't move his arm away, but he shrugs the other shoulder, smiling, and won't look at her face because the smile won't be in his eyes. (She's learning.) "'Shouldn't' doesn't mean much."

_What is, is, and will be. _

Koriand'r has noticed this attitude in both of her humans, and many of her fellow slaves of several races, on Themiscyra. She has no patience for it. It is a warrior's portion to endure until she can triumph, certainly, but if Greywing were less willing to embrace despair, perhaps he would have won free long before he did.

She turns her head to look at the child clambering across Arsenal's lap in the effort to wrestle the fuzzy pink thing from his hands. "And should _she_ never go home. What if her mother is a fool," she says, withdrawing her hand, "and does not submit?"

"He'll probably just kill her."

The rightful queen of Tamaran accepts that prediction with a nod. "But if he does not…we will be party to it. Part of it. And we will not _be _here to wipe the stain away."

The ball of muscle that closes Greywing's jaw jumps. Kori idly wishes the circumstances allowed her to touch it, and marvel all the more at his fragile strength. She has come to appreciate the marble beauty of his features, but likes them best in motion that has feeling behind it, even this coiled tension. "It's too late to back out now," he says.

Truth. Koriand'r brushes her fingertips together, feeling the edges of her aura fuzz against one another. So much power, singing in her blood, and yet she has been brought to heel before.

"Greywing," she says quietly, "You know the heroes. Do you know how we can anonymously contact someone who will protect her from Kord?"

"You want us to _sell out_ our employer?" Greywing's dark brows are far up his otherwise still face. "Are you sure this isn't a scheme to make Earth too hot to hold us, so Roy will never try to come home?"

Koriand'r draws back, stung. "You think that of me?"

He wears an expression of contrition seconds too late for it to be natural, but she has come to know her humans' ways well enough not to grow angrier over that. Greywing's face and voice were taken from him with his name. He wears all three uneasily. False expressions are not always lies on him. "No," he assures her. All irresistible sincerity, and she knows already that she will be reconciled in seconds, but for now she is still offended.

"It is not softness, either," she states. "I swore an _oath_. I will not be one of them."

If they do not stay with her forever, Kori will still keep Arsenal's voice and Greywing's gaze with her, as reminder. She will be Queen, but she will never be the queen that Diana was. She will never be the Queen her mother is, and let a man sell her daughters away for peace. And she will _never_ bear chains again.

Her enemies, she will kill. If she dislikes them, she will kill them _slowly_. But she will not tolerate slavery. And she will not be a party to it.

Greywing's face has gone thinking-blank, gaze distant—she's learned to pay attention to the _size_ of human pupils as well as their direction, to deduce where they are looking, though she's not as good at it as those who grew up with the practice. It's a stupid piece of evolution, but maybe it was useful to their primitive ancestors to be able to point at things without moving their limbs, or some such thing. Anyway, Richard's eyes are different when he's thinking than when he's waiting for her to speak, and she can tell the difference. "Kord won't sell her," he says again, at last, which does not seem worth the time spent on thought. "That isn't his business, and it doesn't turn enough profit to balance the risk, as a sideline."

Koriand'r scowls. "I do not care whether you think it is likely. If it _happens,_ I will be on another world, so I must make it impossible before I go. Understand?"

"You could stay longer."

"Is that _your_ scheme to trap me here?"

"No." Greywing does not rise to the bait, and Koriand'r simmers. He folds his perfect hands. "I _don't_ know heroes. I avoid them. The few I might track down might not listen, and would not keep silence."

"Should I ask Arsenal?"

"He _is_ the one who has contacts," Greywing allows. But she can see he has something else he wishes to say. "Better," he remarks, his pretty face expressionlessly turned toward a wall, "to tip the authorities. Kord is no Ultraman. Police can raid him."

"And the police have _phone numbers_," Kori realizes, a smile spreading across her face. She turns to look at Dorea, gone slack with tiredness against Arsenal's side, her face pressed trustingly just beside a hidden knife. _Mine_, she thinks, though she does not mean it.

They will follow through on the hand-off, and Dorea will feel betrayed, but they will send her protectors. She may die, but she will not be forsaken. It is enough. It is all anyone has a right to.

Any promises beyond that much are lies.

* * *

**_A/N: _**_Fin__ally some Starfire POV._ _I am being such an ass with my classical references. I have no intention of stopping. ^^ Most of the section titles are mythological and some degree of obvious, but the Artemesia whom I have in mind was satrap of Caria under Xerxes the Great, and recognized by her contemporaries as a capable and frighteningly vicious military commander._

_Dick's 'Goose Girl' is based on the Grimm brothers' version, with a number of deviations. XD And Kori is obviously incorrect about most humans being clanless orphans, but she's had a biased sample set._


	59. Human Voices Wake Us

'Human Voices Wake Us'

_**A/N: **__This is pretty dark, but I'm having trouble finishing anything more lighthearted, and it's been long enough since the last update, and Jason wants another turn at bat. So, __**warning**__ for remembered harm to children, SO MUCH harm to children, Owlman is awful, I hate my own sense of realism, studying history will ruin your faith in humanity, goodbye. _

_No actual on-page violence, though._

* * *

Jason was one of twenty kids the Owls grabbed off the street, when Owlman wanted a new Talon.

None of them was younger than ten or older than fourteen, and they hadn't been picked completely at random—nobody mousy was there, no one whose survival strategies were all crawling and skulking and never fighting. Only two of them relied much on whoring to get by, and none of them were full-timers. Most of them had gotten themselves noticed by fighting or running well, where an Owl could see—some rare idiots, like Jason, by fighting _against_ someone with the feather tattoo. Their captors put them in a narrow stone room under the old clock tower together, and Jason still thinks it's a sign of just how fucked they all knew they were that not a single fight broke out.

Men in gray robes and white masks came for them, one by one. Sometimes they came back within about half an hour; sometimes it took two or three. None of the kids ever reappeared. Jason was thirteenth.

He was the only survivor.

That was a heavy little sentence, but Jason had never felt like it was _enough_. It didn't convey the way when they brought him into the room the bodies of the failures had been heaped in the corner. How _small_ they looked, all dozen of them stacked carelessly there, even Lynn who'd been fourteen and a woman's height already, with her nails bitten to the quick and fighting scars thick on her knuckles. She'd been seventh, and her body was almost hidden under the others, but Jason had recognized her hand spilling from the pile, hooked into a claw of agony even in death.

How he'd fought like hell and it hadn't mattered. How once he was strapped down the masks started into a prepared speech about the honor he was being granted, and how even though they tried to be portentous and impressive, even their incredibly obvious evil hadn't been able to hide that they were _bored_. That they'd been through this routine a dozen times already today, and didn't expect him to survive, and had exactly as much interest in the outcome of what they were about to do to him as the average burger joint employee had in whether you enjoyed your meal.

Or the infusion process, dozens of long, too-sharp needles thrust into the _bone_, and then how that had rapidly become _nothing_ compared to how it felt when the masks stood back and _activated _the stuff. For the first time Jason had been able to feel every cell in his body, every individual one, all at once, as they all _screamed_.

That had only been for an instant—the pain had melted together into a white-hot mass and then there'd been nothing else, he didn't know for how long because one of those things that he'd lost the ability to notice was _time_...

And finally, _finally_ something changed, not improved exactly but changed, because _areas _of pain started disappearing, starting from the ends of his hands and feet and working their way in, disappearing and taking everything else with them, pieces of _him_ that felt—nothing, anymore, and he had had an endless second to register rage against how monstrously fucking _unfair_ it was that that didn't even make it hurt less, it just meant the pain was crammed into a smaller space.

A breath later, he couldn't hear his breathing, or feel the air coming down his throat. It was just him and the ball of fire that was his heart, and he thought, _this is dying, then._

And he thought, _No._

Death was right there, offering to take him away from the pain and let the shitshow that had been his life fucking _end _already, and he refused. Pushed back, with all his strength, and it was humiliating to admit but more than anything, it might have been because of that bored-fucking-burger-joint voice coming from behind the owl mask. Because if he was going to die to people who didn't give a shit about it, he wasn't going to go easy. At least one person in the fucking world was going to give a fuck about his passing, even if it had to be him.

He pushed until the star burning at the center of him _burst,_ racing out and flinging feeling into every inch of him again, tearing and awful, and it was only then that he realized he was screaming. That he had been screaming all along, probably, and his voice was long gone.

_"Well,"_ he heard the burger-guy voice say, with a little more interest this time, _"this one survived stage one, at least. Might as well bring the next one in, while his body adjusts for the next round."_

Jason thought _God no,_ and then, mercifully, passed out.

He thought about that day a lot, over the years. More than was healthy, a shrink would probably say—he _knew_ Harley would say. He thought about it especially when he was thinking about guilt, about responsibility. About choice.

Because he could have died, then. He'd have died a pointless little shit of a street rat, but that wasn't as worthless as he'd thought it was, back then, or as shameful. He'd have died _clean._ The option had been there, the out, dragging him down into the pitying dark, and he'd chosen to live.

Later, when—later, it hadn't so much been a choice. Oh, he'd _chosen, _his hands on the knives, the swords, those were _his _crimes, he wasn't trying to duck that; just because the bulk of the blame lay on the Owl didn't mean he didn't have plenty to feel guilty about. But he hadn't gotten another shot at dying.

There'd always been a _chance_ Bruce Wayne would kill him if he failed enough, if he defied enough, if he made himself useless, but not a secure enough one for him to look there for an escape. Especially with the rumor he'd heard, about decommissioned Talons, how they locked you in a coffin and you just lay there for ever and ever and ever, _not screaming, not dying._

(God, he will think later on. And it had turned out to be _true._

Jason will be so glad that when those coffins opened and the contents spilled out, it was to fight a civil war in the Court, because if they'd been sent against him…well, they were weakened, most of them, from their time in storage, and he knows he could have won. If Drake could, did, he definitely would have. But it would have cost him. Even more than it would cost him to cut down normal people again, _good _people, and he knows that's wrong but he doesn't care. They were like him. They didn't have a choice about what they were turned into, and if he's learned to almost believe J is right that _he_ still deserves to live after everything, then…)

It's weird. He didn't hate himself, when he was Talon. It wasn't…he couldn't afford luxuries like that, he guesses. If he hated himself for what he'd become, then on the one hand, he'd be thinking about things that might make him hate Owlman loudly enough for it to show. Which was a terrible idea. And on the other, he couldn't afford to be tearing himself down inside; he was all the ally he had.

He didn't hate himself, then. Or at least, if he did, he never thought about it. He'd made his choice, after all. He was fighting to survive.

It's different. Now that he's free.

They don't understand. None of them. Not Harley, who can read all the boo-boos on your heart like _they're_ what matters, or even Crane with his freakily narrow laser X-ray vision for what fucking _terrifies_ the shit out of you. Not Jones, who's lived his whole life with being _mistaken_ for a monster and knows how to believe it's not true no matter how confident the bitches and bastards are. Not even Karlo, whose own body freaks him out so bad even after he's been this way for years, but he's only afraid of _losing_ who he is inside, not that it isn't worth keeping.

Sure as hell not _Dent_, who, it's hilarious, who thinks he's _so fucking bad,_ like he's got an _actual_ monster inside that he has to chain down. Because he went after the a guy who screwed him over so bad—didn't even kill him, didn't even fuck him up all that bad long-term, just made him _hurt_—because he went there into that place _one goddamn time_, it's like he thinks he has to watch himself like he's his own fucking probation officer. Jason wants to laugh in his face—_both of 'em_—so hard and so often he's put his teeth through his tongue a time or two. And Dent says it's not the same, because no one _made_ him cross that line, because he went there on his own, because he was an adult.

Like any of that matters.

But as much of a moralizing idiot as Dent is, he does understand about watching yourself. And he didn't trust Jason right away, just because Jokester did or because he was underage or for any other stupid reason. He waited, and he watched, until Jason had had at least an even chance to _prove_ one way or the other what he was made of.

So even though they don't like each other, it's Dent he goes to, after the Martian invasion, while he's still feeling more like a soldier than a feral animal or an unforgivably dumb kid, Dent he catches in the scrubby vacant lot out behind their new base and says, "Look, if you ever have to put me down—"

And of course _because_ Dent is a moralizing idiot, that's as far as he gets before the man breaks in with a, "_Jason,_" and when exactly did they upgrade to first names? Jason has the uncomfortable feeling he's a step behind in this not-relationship, like he and Dent had some kind of significant fucking conversation during the space war and it didn't make it into long-term memory because of the repeated temporary brain death.

He waves a hand to clear all that aside, and pulls a face at himself when he realizes he's picked up that gesture off of Jokester, even if it's different on him, sharp and flicking instead of that ridiculous flaily-flutter. "_If you need to put me down_," he repeats, "because we just went up against a telepathic army of shapeshifters, don't tell me this is never going to be a thing. There's stuff you can't come back from, and I never want to live as anybody's mindless weapon. You got that?"

Dent huffs a put-upon sort of sigh, and knuckles his forehead where the scars fade into normal skin. "Fine."

Jason nods, satisfied with that much. "Don't just assume because I stopped moving, it's done. Don't turn your back on the body. If you don't have the facilities to cremate me right away, for fuck's sake get the head and the major limbs away from each other." Dent's looking a little bit sick, but he doesn't interrupt again. "Burn it, as soon as you can. Don't even think about burial, no matter how sentimental Harley gets. Yeah? She can sentimentalize a goddamn urn."

"Are you sure that level of caution is really necessary?"

"Better safe than sorry," Jason shoots back, because it's better than coming out with any more deeply honest answer; he's laying enough of himself out already. He blows out a sigh. "I just want to make sure, if it happens, that one of you has thought through the contingencies already. I'm not easy to kill, and I'm not easy to keep that way."

And if he ever did wake up in a coffin, after something like that, either he'd still be evil and it would need to be strong to keep him in, or he'd be himself and it needed to be weak to let him break out, and he doesn't even want to think about it being the wrong way around.

"You should talk to Ed," Dent says, maybe half sarcastic. "I'm pretty sure he still writes up zombie survival protocols for fun."

"World we live in, that's not even a joke anymore." Jason snorts. "Sure, bring him in, can't hurt. I don't care. Just, if you have to put me down, _don't half-ass it_. Fuck."

He turns his back on Dent—it's a gesture he exploits the fuck out of, the way it can say anything from _you're not worth my time _to _I'm trusting you here_ or, in this case, both—and starts to walk away. He keeps thinking he'll take up smoking again (he's pretty sure he can't get cancer anymore) and then not going through with it, because Ella follows him around _way_ too often for her own health already; he doesn't need to add secondhand smoke to her risk list.

"Just for the record," Dent says, not coming after him. "You are a seriously morbid little shit."

"But I'm right," Jason counters. And goes inside.


	60. Science Fiction Double Feature

'Science Fiction Double Feature' (Doctor X will build a creature!)

* * *

Another shimmering green forcefield snapped into place, cutting off his ascent, and Ultraman bared his teeth as the rage in his chest crested. His right arm still ached from his confident attempt to punch through the first barrier. He shot off at a right angle, only to find himself cut off _yet again_ before he'd gone three miles.

A few seconds of increasingly furious course corrections later, he had realized he was in a box. One that was rapidly shrinking. The energy fields that made up each wall slid through the landscape without sign of impediment—he tried smashing his way out through a tree that seemed to have made a hole, only to find in a shower of sawdust and a new pain in his knuckles that the field was constant straight through the trunk, and sweeping ever inward. It only contained _him._

His laser vision bounced, when he tried it, clipping his cheekbone the first time and melting a hole in the highway below the second. And still he was being herded slowly back.

This stank of Luthor. Ultraman spun on the spot, X-ray vision strafing his surroundings until it landed on a familiar skeletal structure, hunched over one of his petty little machines.

He smirked. Incredible. The green walls were closing in fast, but for now the idiot genius had trapped himself _inside a box with Kal-El_.

It was too good to resist. Not that there was any reason to try. Ultraman _moved. _For the first mile, he was too fast for the human eye to register, but then, as he approached the fiddling scientist, he gave a sharp burst of speed precisely calculated to cause a sonic boom, making Luthor jerk his head up, and then slowed just enough that the bald man could see him approach.

With his perfect vision, he was able to watch Luthor's eyes widen in horror and his hands begin a panicked rush over the controls, scrabbling to save himself. Ultraman clenched his fist in preparation to shatter the fragile little force-field generator and go straight through to break every single one of Luthor's ribs. And maybe tear his spine out for good and all, this time.

The green barriers were closing in fast, but they weren't going to be there in time to stop him splattering Luthor into as many pieces as he pleased.

He watched Luthor reach toward a lever with his eyes full of the knowledge that he would be too slow, and felt a grin start across his face, and then—

And then, suddenly, he'd been knocked spinning in an explosion of pain, hard impact underwritten by the cell-searing weight that he knew as Kryptonite, and an irritating nasal voice was shrieking, "_Green button, schmucker!"_

His head bounced off a force field and it _hurt, _more than his fists had earlier even though he'd hit with less force; he flailed briefly, recovered, and—the box had closed. He was trapped. By himself.

Outside the prison of energy, Luthor drew a slightly uneven breath and frowned at the tall, bony human whose interference had indubitably saved his life. "I...I _had_ that."

"Ahahaha! You're welcome, Lexy!"

The sulky look upgraded to a glower. "Stop calling me that!"

"Psh." Jokester, because that was _of course_ the culprit, leaned on his hammer, completely ignoring the captive Kryptonian glaring death from inside his transparent prison. "There's a billion people called Alex. Lex is _cool._"

Everything looked green from inside the box, especially the things that actually were green. Like the clown's suit. And, yes, one of the buttons near the head of that ridiculous, awful shimmering metal hammer. He _hated_ green. When he ruled the world, the only things he would permit to be green were the ones depending on chloroplasts to live.

"Lex sounds like an asshole. Probably drives a muscle car…" The engineer's voice trailed off in distraction as his hands flew over the controls on his projector, oscillating the energy frequencies perfectly, carefully, because even the strongest static barrier would shatter before the power of Krypton. Sometimes it took a while, but it always happened. He'd learned, damn him. This was Ultraman's best chance of escaping until they'd had him locked up for a few months, and whatever lackeys they set to watching him relaxed their vigilance. His best window, and he was _helpless. _Kal slammed his fists, repeatedly, _uselessly,_ against the inside of the glowing box.

Meanwhile, the disfigured jester found Luthor's grounds for objection hilarious, and bounced a little on his toes. Ultraman contemplated twisting his head off. He might actually hate Jokester more than Luthor, in this moment. At least the scientist _took him seriously_. Most of the time. "'Kay, how 'bout just _Ex?_ You need a stage name already, fit in with the crowd better, you can be…_Scientist X! _No, you're right, that's stupid. Doctor X? Professor X?"

Luthor squinted up from his instruments long enough to pull an aggrieved expression. "What is it with you and paring people's names down into single letters? Is one of your pet names for Harlequin '_R?'_"

"No, but maybe it should be! _Arrrh,_" Jokester repeated _in a pirate voice_, and Ultraman's struggles paused for a split second the better to glare resentment in the clown's direction, for making his latest defeat into a scene of total absurdity. His eyes glowed dimly, but red beams failed to materialize—the Kryptonite exposure had been brief, but he was not yet recovered. The green force field was filtering out enough sun that it would take a long time to get back his strength. And by then he'd probably have been cast into the latest government-sanctioned deep pit.

His failure to summon his searing vision annoyed _Luthor_, of all people, because it compromised the obtainable data about the effectiveness of the force field cage. He muttered to himself about it as he continued to tweak the projector settings.

"Nah," concluded the clown, still preoccupied with nicknames, "she's got Q all sewn up already. _Janus _for R though, maybe; I can hardly call him _J._ No, wait, _V! _Hee!"

Luthor snorted over his work, he and Ultraman united in opinion for once, and the vigilante humorist rolled both eyes and arranged himself languidly against the nearest tree with folded arms. "Look, X-man, you shouldn't've given me a hammer with a 'Kryptonite' setting if you didn't want help with the big guy."

"Well, obviously that's why I gave it to you. I just hadn't _asked_ for help _today._"

"Aww, don't be a control freak, old bean."

"I'm a _scientist_. If something unexpected enters an experiment, it's automatically an error because it will confuse the results. And I can't afford errors around him."

As if he hadn't made a nearly-fatal one today. Ultraman sneered perfect disdain in Luthor's direction. No, he was definitely back to loathing Luthor most. He had let himself sink until his feet were braced on the bottom of the energy cube, and now gathered all the strength still in his body and threw it all into one rocketing _punch_.

Both heroes ignored the resulting flash of light. _Ignored._

Ultraman rubbed his twinging hand bones and stood still, glaring. Well, let them ignore him then. It was possible the only chance of escape relied on his nemesis making another stupid mistake. Being underestimated was useful.

He just _hated_ it.

"Unless you've got somebody around to bail you out," Jokester had retorted, spinning his precious oversized weapon, and Luthor's shoulders sagged slightly. _Hah_, Kal thought, _busted_. Luthor had gotten so caught up in the science he'd let common sense fall by the wayside, and he knew it.

"Thanks," the bald human muttered gracelessly, and evidently deciding his manual oscillation trials had gathered enough data now to calibrate the machine to work without him, he straightened up from his dials and switches and fixed the clown with an expectant look. "Now, what do you want?"

"I can't just have stumbled on you by coincidence?"

"In the Maryland countryside? No. Why are you here?"

"Well, I had this _spiritual intimation _that a charming hero with dashing good looks was required to save the day, and since you're a little lacking in the charm department…"

Luthor laughed. "Shut up."

"You're not provin' me wrong here, X."

With another snort, this one amused in spite of himself, Luthor went back to his instruments, rapidly shuffling the power couplings and projector points into a new configuration that seemed designed to reduce the truck-sized field projector to a small mobile unit. The force fields, to Ultraman's ire, remained stable, though he was exerting steady pressure against them with his palms, searching for weaknesses. "Really, though," Luthor said. "What's up?"

Jokester hesitated until Luthor had finished reconfiguring his machine and lifted it carefully in both hands, leaving behind the complex array of power generator and positional computation which must have allowed him to shape the initial giant trap. He'd at least thought ahead to what happened after the trap succeeded, even if the middle of the plan had been so fuzzy.

_How was it_ that a human whose only ability worth bragging about was his intellect could make such an _idiotic mistake,_ and _still_ defeat him? (Sometimes Kal worried that Owlman was right, in what he never quite said outright: that his father would have been ashamed if he'd lived to see what he'd made of himself. Jor-El had been a brilliant scientist, after all, and no matter what he did he could never—quite—_keep up_.)

Jokester's manner was airy and unconcerned in a way that Ultraman suspected meant he was talking about something important. It was possible that Owlman's most persistent nuisance was _even more annoying _than his own, even if less effective. Next time they met, he might grant the masked man that point. The clown tapped his chin thoughtfully. "What do you know about human experimentation?"

Luthor very nearly dropped the machine, fumbled, secured his grip again (to a mental chorus of curses from his prisoner), and eyeballed the Jokester. "Was that an accusation?"

"Wha—? No. It's...we've got somebody who's been experimented on, and his body's weird enough…Strawman only does neurology and Ivy does all kinds of experimental biology but she doesn't work with animals, so…." He shrugged. "I know you mostly do mechanical engineering type stuff, but I figured if you couldn't help us yourself, you could recommend somebody."

Luthor's eyes narrowed thoughtfully. "What sort of modifications has he had?"

The clown paused for a second to glance at the imprisoned Kryptonian, and shrugged. "Guess it's all common knowledge at this point. Super-healing, basically. Defies physics along with biology, but not completely—we've seen him grow back a whole hand without taking the mass from anywhere we can tell, but turns out blood loss makes him really, really thirsty."

The furrow between Luthor's brows that said he'd been fully engaged by a problem _should_ represent an opportunity for escape or other advantage, but Ultraman couldn't be happy about it because he was still _right here;_ how could Luthor be focused on something else _already?_ Kal hoped he tripped on a tree root. "Are you _sure_ he's not taking the mass from elsewhere in his body? He could strip a lot from his bones and muscles and even organ reserves before it became obvious to the naked eye."

"Well, we haven't _chopped bits off him_ and then put him on a scale to see if his weight goes up when he heals," Jokester shrugged. "And you don't get to, either. Can you help us out, or not?"

"First, that's human experimentation and I have no intention of doing it," Luthor retorted, waspish. He set the field-projector in the bed of the truck and stepped back, ending Kal's hope that his distraction. "For the second, I'll see what I can do."

Kal had now tested every inch of his prison for weakness. The shrunken machine was doing its job too well.

So Ultraman slammed his palm against the inside of his prison again, not in an escape attempt this time but to get the heroes' attention. They must have sensed the difference, because after all these minutes of flagrantly ignoring him, this time it worked. "Talon," he stated, once they looked over. A grin starting at Owlman's expense. "You stole _Talon_."

Jokester huffed. "He's a _person,_ you can't _steal_ him. But yeah. He's with us now. What, it didn't get onto the supervillain grapevine yet?"

Ultraman shook his head. Not that anyone except occasionally Dash, or Owlman when he wanted something, ever sought him out for conversation—all too scared of his power and his willingness to use it—but he was fairly sure even the gossips didn't know this yet. He was the world's most accomplished eavesdropper, after all.

Too bad it would probably have blown over by the time he escaped; he'd love to be able to go to Gotham and hold this over Owlman's head. A _second_ one in less than four years, and this one actually _defecting to the enemy?_ Let's hear him lecture about 'control' _now!_

The Jokester laughed. It had a different note of triumph than the one it had hit as he unleashed his Kryptonite hammer. Kal wasn't sure whether it sounded more or less crazy. "I can't wait 'til it gets out," he said with relish.

Sadly, the clown could probably wait _enough_ that he wouldn't even consider letting Ultraman go so just he could spread gossip.

As if this tinge of resignation had been mentally projected straight into his shiny bald skull, Luthor finally turned back toward Ultraman, sought out his eyes. Kal made them glow red, and otherwise maintained a grim expressionlessness. He had dignity, even if no one else here did. "I'm going to knock you unconscious now," the scientist announced levelly. "When you wake up, you should be in federal custody again. Your previous appeal of your case will probably need to be refiled after this new series of crimes."

Ultraman narrowed his eyes. Luthor's perpetual need to make a show of his pretended _legitimacy_, as if _any_ relationship with his human government would give him _any_ right to control Kal-El…it never failed to grate. The clown laughed. "He doesn't care, X," he pointed out. "Any more than I do when Owlface sics the cops on _me._"

Luthor heaved a sigh and set down an odd, bulbous device that scampered forward on tiny legs until it was directly under Ultraman's cage. "He's the one who makes this personal," he declared, and the little device fired upward a tube that passed effortlessly through the bright green force field and emitted a high-pressure burst of equally green gas in the half-second before Ultraman crushed it between his fingers.

He locked his teeth and refused to breathe in. He could wait for _hours_.

"Why's it a tube?" the Jokester asked, watching him thoughtfully. "Why not, I dunno, a dart? If he crushed that the gas would come _out_, right?"

"He could throw that back out," Luthor shrugged. Ultraman jerked sharply on the tube, hoping to gain the entire crawling device as a missile, but Luthor had prepared for that, and all he got was a length of flexible plastic tubing.

He threw it at Luthor's face anyway. Anything was a deadly weapon if it hit hard enough.

The tubing stopped hard against another, invisible force field, two feet from Luthor's face.

"It's not an inhalable, you know," Luthor informed him. Just in time for Kal to feel a fuzziness starting to seep in around the corners of his vision.

Through the skin? It was impervious! Except to certain radiation signatures. Small enough molecules might be permeating through the mucous membranes, and he closed his eyes to cut that avenue off. It also spared him from having to look at Luthor's smug, bland face, or the clown's hideous grin. Or the darkness that continued closing in.

Frustration bit sour at the back of his throat. Here he went, again. Weeks or months in whatever holding pen the government had knocked together _this_ time. It was never enough. He would _always_ get out. And then he would make them pay. "Just wait, Luthor," he gritted out. "I won't let you off easy next…time…."

It was a good thing his Fortress was automated enough that he didn't have to worry about who would feed his cat.


End file.
